RIP Vibe Coding. Feb 2025-Oct 2025.

0:00This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey, folks, I'm Ammar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky and we'll help you get started. Head to ai.studio slash build to create your first app. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. This week, as I am out traveling for my anniversary, we are going to have a combination of regular shows as well as some different formats that we don't normally get to do.

0:39And one of those is an interview with the man, the myth, the legend, Sean Wang, better known as Swix. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:54All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Google Gemini, Blitzy, Robots and Pencils, and super intelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, shoot us a note at sponsors at ai daily brief.ai. Also, another quick reminder of our ROI benchmarking study. It's live at roisurvey.ai. Please take a minute to add a couple of use cases. I'd so appreciate it. And there's a bunch of goodies in there for people who help. Now, you might have heard me talk about SWIX on here, or maybe you've heard his podcast late in space or his events, the AI engineer summit and AI Engineer World's Fair.

1:29And even though many of us who are creators or listeners of this show aren't technical or aren't developers ourselves outside of vibe coding, I think it's a really valuable thing to spend our time understanding what developers are talking about. As I discussed with Sean in this show, it's a little bit like previewing the future. And so what we do in this conversation is look at the big themes that he is thinking about and the big conversations shaping that sector of the industry, and also how he's turning those into key themes for the AI Engineer Code Summit, which is coming up in New York. Now, for those of you who will be at the AI Engineer Code Summit, I will be speaking there and I'm very excited.

2:02But without any further ado, let's get into this conversation and bring SWIX once again back to the AI Daily Brief. All right, Sean slash SWIX, better known as SWIX. How are you doing, man? Welcome back to the show. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me again. Yeah, it's always great to check in with you. As I was just saying, I think the reason that I'm always pointing people to you and the set of content that you're around is, I think, especially for folks who are outside of the kind of AI engineering conversation, understanding what the builders are talking about is kind of like living in the future a little bit.

2:34So what I wanted to do today is dig into maybe some of those conversations that are driving the AI engineering community. And the specific context that I think is interesting is you have a big event coming up in just about a month, a little less than a month now, where obviously you have to think about and crystallize those things into content. So maybe let's kick off by just, if you want to tell us a little bit about the Code Summit and how you think about this event relative to the others that you do. Yeah, and I should also flag that you're speaking, which I'm very excited about. Yes, and I can't wait to be back with you.

3:05So I've been organizing AI Engineer Summits for three years, and usually they are kind of generalist. They focus on just whoever are the best speakers I can get and the general state of AI. And I think that now the meta is kind of shifting towards focus and concentration on a certain topic, because when we have as many sort of applicants as we have, because it's like a, you know, you have to apply to get into this conference, we get to pick. And like the best vibes are when everyone you run into is all concentrated on the same theme, like you gather for a certain topic. And even like changing the name and like focusing on a certain theme changes the entire vibe of the whole thing, which is very cool, very, very, very fun.

3:53It is something I realized as a meetup organizer. So we're doing, this is our first ever summit entirely focused on AI coding. And we're doing enterprise and individual contributor days as well. But I think like the focus is on like why coding has emerged as something that has particular product market fit and especially emerged this year. And it seems weird for me to say this as someone who's had a whole career in developer tools and kind of always focused on AI coding. We've never done this before. But I think this is the year, like, you know, most people don't even remember that Cloud Code only emerged in March this year and is now larger than, you know, $600 million business.

4:37And it was like after our last summit in New York when you were emceeing. So like a lot has changed. Cognition and Cursor have emerged as very large startups. I can't even call them startups anymore. It's like what we've been calling is agent labs that are starting to rival the model labs in terms of market pool, valuation, employees, what have you. And I think it's one of the most interesting stories of the year. Yeah, I mean, what's fascinating about this is it is, I don't think anyone would disagree that this is, if not the dominant or most important AI theme of the year, it's certainly got to be among the top two, you know?

5:19And it was not on the radar as the thing that was going to drive all conversations. You know, when everyone was doing their end of year content, you know, their end of 2024 into 2025 content predictions, no one, at least anyone that I saw was like, this is the year of coding. This is the year of AI coding, AI coding agents. It was the AI, the year of AI agents broadly, Right. That was sort of like the money's on bet for what happened. The vibe coding only Carpathy said that tweet in February. Right. It's it's it feels like a million years ago because of the inevitability. But it really, you know, we are kind of just catching up with ourselves in some ways.

5:54A little bit. And I actually also, you know, have a spicy thing because generally I agree with Andre and everything. And most people do. But I think the one thing that is happening right now is that the software engineers are feeling very uncomfortable. with vibe coding. And I think, you know, you talk about how we are six months ahead of the main street. Vibe coding, you know, I declared the end of vibe coding being cool this month. And I think a lot of what we're meaning to discuss at AIE Code Summit is like, what's after vibe coding? Like, how can we avoid the slop and like build software that we don't hate?

6:32Don't get stuck in rabbit holes that the agents might go down sometimes. and so it's going to take work from the model labs which we which we have represented it's going to take work from the agents and it's going to take work from the the customers which we also you know want to hear from so i i think it's uh it's interesting because like there's new terms and people are putting super popular but i think it also might need to evolve in some way yeah well so so let's actually try to unpack this a little bit because this is this is sort of to me this was like okay declaration like sean's now in uh in spicy mode for what what's coming with this event, right?

7:07I think the tweet was RIP vibe coding 2025 to 2025 or something like that, like perfectly constructed tweet. But so let's talk about what, where the, where the discomfort is coming from and maybe sort of like what the difference between what someone who's sort of excited about this term still is thinking about when they see it versus what this group of engineers who are getting more uncomfortable with when they, when they see that term, what they're kind of perceiving. Yeah. I think the issue comes with like every one of us, every software engineer is very happy that people who are non-technical can get to somewhere productive without engineers engineers are expensive they're uh hard to do work with they're divas you know whatever like just just you know um they don't need to help make your website your personal website when lovable and bold exist and i think that nobody's nobody has any issue with that.

7:59I think it comes to a head when you start to say like, oh, I vibe coded this. Like, come on, it only took me like an hour. Now here, here, take it. And I expect the full thing by Friday. And like, well, you know, you haven't dealt with any of the hard stuff. You've only painted the sort of superficial picture and you confuse that for the full working app. That's one issue. That is the sort of non-technical to technical handoff that is not being discussed, negotiated. In fact, what is happening is the infralayers are specializing for the non-technical people so that the sort of vibe coders, the non-technical people, are basically building a completely different stack than the technical ones.

8:44And so when you hand it off, you have to completely rebuild because it doesn't use any of the same tech. I mean, it's somewhat exaggerating. I think the best crossover tech right now is Superbase, which is why Superbase is doing so well. They've basically quadrupled valuation this year. But there's a lot of experimentation in just that front. Then there's also the inter-software engineer fights, where software engineers are also vibro-coding, of course, but some of them are being a lot more sloppy than others. And the people who care about software, care about security, care about maintenance, care about honestly just like getting things right or understanding your code so that you don't get into trouble because LLMs just do run into rabbit holes and sometimes to really get them out you have to understand the code you can't just sort of wash your hands off it or just flow based on vibes so when that stuff happens and people are irresponsible then they also tend to like leave PRs to other people have to clean up so you know I think like people just want something better A lot of people are talking about spectrum and development as a way forward, which is something that Amazon is pushing a lot, as well as a number of other people.

9:58Like my top speaker from World's Fair was Sean Grove from OpenAI, who was basically pitching spectrum and development and model alignment specs. So like, I think there's a lot of action around this. The term that has to sort of replace or complement VibeCoding hasn't emerged yet, but I can definitely feel it in the air. It's literally present in every conversation I have. Everyone's sick and tired of iPod coding. Yeah. So it's super interesting. A couple of things. One, there's this classic pattern with change, technology change, where we forget temporarily that the paradigm shift isn't going to be from a set of problems to an era of no problems.

10:42It's trading one set of problems for another, which hopefully it's a good trade-off. It's a sufficiently good trade-off that that new set of problems we'd rather deal with because of the gains that come from the switch, right? And I think that that second part of the conversation that you were just mentioning, sort of the intra-engineer conversation, is a lot about that. It's like, okay, well, now we have to reconcile with all of the stuff that comes along with if we can do XYZ much faster or automated or with background agents, it creates this new set of problems and we are still going to have to deal with those.

11:14We're going to have to re-architect our systems and sort of, you know, the way that we work to accommodate that. And I think that that's a very natural process of like figuring that out and actually sort of rationalizing what it looks like to use these systems well, even as the technology is changing. And I want to come back and kind of talk about maybe the sync async spectrums and a couple other things that you've talked about as it relates to kind of where these things are. The first one, you know, I was thinking about this. We really don't, we don't have a word for the difference between sort of professional and amateur in the context of a democratizing technology, right?

11:51Like, you know, if you think about like, I was trying to trying to make the proxy of like content creation with social media, right? TikTok and CapCut come along and everyone can make videos. There's clearly a difference between amateur videos and Christopher Nolan, and no one would not acknowledge that. And then in the middle, it gets blurry, of course. And there's some people who may not be as technically good, but the things that they produce, people like more. And, you know, but there's still like, you know, the terms that we have are all dumb, right? Creator, influencer, like they just kind of, they don't actually convey this gap.

12:20And I think it's actually, one, I think it's completely unsurprising to me that coding is sort of figuring this out first in the context of AI. You know, AI becomes this mass democratization technology, but there is still a difference between, to your point, like my sick terminal-based, you know, AI Daily Brief website that I use Lovable to maintain and like an actual product that goes out and, you know, an enterprise is not going to freak out on because it's got, you know, kind of its security set up. You know, we just don't have good terminology for that, which I think is a challenge. Because to your point, I don't think anyone is actually in disagreement that these things are different things.

12:54Yeah, I think to some extent, it is our job to figure it out. Like, this is not an unsolvable problem. And so I want to put people at ease here in terms of, like, you know, keep doing what you're doing, keep up with the bolts and lovables and bi-building in general, I think it is the job of the engineers to try to figure out that transition path because we haven't worked it out yet. You know, I'm gathering people and trying to focus people's energies on this because clearly when a new technology emerges and it is somewhat disruptive to the old technology, people who are tied to the old technology complain, which is exactly what they're doing here, by the way.

13:31But also the goal is not to reject the new technology, it's to embrace it and figure out how to reshape everything else in order to accommodate it. So I think like there's more synergy here than like people fear when they first hear about this stuff. Yeah, I wonder if there's, I mean, you know, I don't know if it's an interim solution or not, but it feels like there's a role or at least a function around sort of translating. You know, if you've got all, especially if you think inside an organization or a startup, you've got all these folks who are now able to speak with code, right? Instead of talking about features they want, they can just, you know, mock them up, which is what we do, what every company I know at this does.

14:09you're talking about sort of the challenge of translation. It feels like that's a thing that someone could get really good at, you know, both helping people sort of, you know, build things in the right way in the beginning. But anyways, there's lots of developments that I think are going to come on that front. Okay. So the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is sort of, you know, builds off of this a little bit is what this landscape of AI and agentic coding platforms, the full breadth of it now, because part of the challenge and why sort of vibe coding RIP, I think is that like, if you go back six months ago, it's like, who's going to win bolt or lovable.

14:41It's literally that. And then Claude code comes and it's like, okay, now, you know, as opposed to now people, people with a passing glance, see lovable bolt, Claude code code, code X, CLI, uh, cognition factory. And it is sort of this, you know, this broad spectrum. And, and you actually wrote about this a little bit when, when you sort of shared that you were joining cognition, huge congrats, by the way. I think that's, by the way, for my money, maybe the most useful. I'm making a career switch blog post that I've ever seen. Usually that's a very, very sort of self-indulgent thing. It's just like, here's my trajectory.

15:16That was like kind of packed with interesting observations. And one of them that you talked about is the sync-async spectrum. I would love, without asking you to kind of boil the ocean, share kind of roughly how you see the topography of these categories of coding tools emerging right now. Yeah, you're making me think about other conversations I've had since that publication. But yeah, so totally. I think there are a number of charts that people have made. And, you know, basically coding agents are enormously popular. Now we're just figuring out what the ideal interfaces for them are, right? So probably it initially started with GitHub Copilot, which is just spicy autocomplete, as they say.

16:02Devin launched like two years ago with sort of the web app sort of interface. Code interpreter is also in the mix somewhere in there where, you know, you can chat and like it starts to generate code and run and execute that code. I would say then in Cursor, obviously, with Composer and all the other Cursor agent stuff that they're launching. So I think now the form factors are you have the IDE or VS Code extension. You have the web app. You have Slack or whatever your team collaboration thing is. You might also want to put linear in there. And then finally, you have the terminal, which is obviously the newest that emerged on the scene this year with Cloud Code.

16:44So basically, you just need universal handoff among everything. And I think that's the goal. Everything I've described, all the surface areas, all the companies pretty much have all of them now, I think, with Cloud Code going to the web and Codex coming to the VS Code extension. Everyone's got everything. And I think that the handoff is not worked out yet. So Cloud Code is the first one to work out the hackiest possible version, which is Cloud Code Teleport, where you can just sort of dump the JSON of the chat and continue with it locally, because they're the same instance, same Cloud Code on both sides.

17:20But I think there may be some more evolutions from there, because that's not naturally how we transfer context between engineers working differently. And so in my post, I started talking about the sick-facing spectrum and you kind of need to own that, which is why I was very impressed with Cognition buying Windsurf when Windsurf was out for grabs. Because, well, here's the number two IDE. It's for cheap because a month ago it was$3 billion. Now it's worth less. The rumor is$300. I actually haven't even confirmed that number. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, at some point it's worth buying. And actually, you know, you start to have a leg up in that sort of sync side of the spectrum while async is having extreme product market fit, right?

18:02Like I talked a little bit about the numbers in the Cognition blog post as well. So like, I think that's good. I think actually sync async might be a bad framing, which is really weird for me. Because one thing that's happening now that you're going to see with Cursor 2.0 today and also what Cognition is launching is that the async side is moving faster rather than slower. Because I think there's been a perverse incentive to measure all these coding agents based on the number of hours worked. And where else do we do that? Well, lawyers and everything that we hate because you're just incentivizing them to take more time, which is horrible.

18:41No one actually wants that. We're just using that as a poor proxy for what difficulty of work you're actually doing. So everyone's working on faster agents, I think, which is good for users, ultimately, because that's what we want in practice. The async side is becoming more synced. And then the sync side is changing in terms of the mindset. Why do you want synchronous code? Well, the actual answer is because not everything can be vibe-coded. like the anti-vibe code is to turn your brain on instead of off and use ai to augment your skills and thinking rather than to replace it and with scrolling twitter right so the sync mode is for the deepest focused and hardest problems where you need the centaur combination of human and ai and so that's that's what i posted in the the recent thing we shipped on sweetgrap where we have the uh sort of async value of productivity right like either you're super productive because you're in flow and you're focused and you're working on hard problems.

19:42If agents take longer, then you start to switch away and change context and lose context. And then later on, when you start to get more productive again, because you're able to employ parallel async background agents on stuff that is really commodity and you can trust the elements to nail it.

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22:04What this reflects to me is the richness of the, just the topic of AI coding is why, why you can do an entire summit about the variety of conversations going on here. What are some of the other conversations that you're trying to bring in, you know, that have been maybe part of, part of previous summits that you've done, you know, evals, memory, context, like sort of what, you know, rag, like what, what are, what are some of the other big kind of big hitters that are going to be you think key parts of the conversation heading into this year's event yeah i think memory and planning are always going to be huge context engineering is obviously a huge theme this year and we have the the guy who one of the three people that coined context engineering uh speaking dex dex is a fantastic speaker one of the top speakers at world's fair and i think like then the other part is honestly just like organizational transitions which actually uniquely as a podcast you will cover, which is rare, which is more of a leadership topic, right?

22:59Like, sure, like the AI exists, but like, how do you like move an existing large organization to take advantage of it, to upskill your team and maybe potentially reorg in order to capture the opportunities, right? Like, I think like this is one of those things where like for the first time I'm able to feature people from like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey and some of the top enterprises in the world. Northwestern Mutual, and Bloomberg's coming back this year. There's just a lot of very interesting, especially East Coast stories that I wanted to feature because a lot of tech is very West Coast centric, but there's a lot of good stuff happening in enterprises too.

23:41Yeah, on the organizational change piece, one of the things that I think is really interesting about, and I think to me was reflective of just how dominant the AI coding theme has been this year is when we started, you know, when we were kind of first doing some of these agent audits around the beginning of the year, it was very often the case that the engineering departments were surprisingly some of the holdouts. They were the sort of most intransigent around wanting to adopt new systems. And while I don't, while my perception is not that that's gone away entirely, it does feel like there has been a major shift over the course of the year, perhaps as the tools have gotten better, as the models have gotten better, as, you know, maybe our understanding of, you know, how to integrate these systems has gotten better.

24:26Certainly not universal, but we see less and less, you know, just, you know, over my dead body kind of engineering departments when it comes to some of these transitions. Yeah, totally. And I think like there's a lot of knowledge sharing in this kind of stuff, but it's also not fully well mapped out. And honestly, I'm waiting to hear from you and the rest of the speakers on the leadership day to map out the state of affairs and what is working, what is not among the enterprises that you talk to. So speaking of that, one term, basically going back to what you were saying about vibe coding, it almost feels like part of the challenge is that this same word or same phrase means different things to different people, right?

25:07I think that context engineering is going to be a term that has a similar bifurcation or potential bifurcation in the year. Because context engineering is a very sort of like technical set of questions for engineers who are thinking about how to design systems that better interact with context. But it is also now a leadership or sort of a change mindset as people like basically sort of akin to prompt engineering for individuals where organizations are thinking about context engineering as how do we sort of organize our data, broadly speaking, to be ready to be used by these systems? How do I think as I am prompting individually as a sort of, you know, a frontline worker in a company?