Vibe Coding Could Change Everything

9:09Joanna Stern:And I think my reaction was like, oh my God, not only are we doing this, I can't believe it did this already. I mean, this was like two minutes after we were talking about this. And then eventually we brought in some actual humans who know how to write code at the Wall Street Journal to... To fix our code.

9:24Ben Cohen:So when we sent this to some of our in-house folks, Brian Witten, who's one of our computational journalists, Audrey Valbuena, one of our designers, they had some notes.

9:34Ryan Knutson:They weren't as impressed as we were. Coming up, we talk to one of those humans who knows how to write code and contemplate what this all means for people's jobs.

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11:18Ryan Knutson:Brian Witten is a computational journalist at the Wall Street Journal.

11:22Joanna Stern:Sometimes I like to call it journalism at scale. I'll build a lot of tools for reporters, investigative tools, reporting tools, things to help them analyze stuff that we can put together. And sometimes I'll build interactive things for readers to click on, which is nice because then I could show my parents something and be like, I built that and they'll understand what I do.

11:42Ryan Knutson:Brian is one of the people Joanna and Ben showed their code to. What did you think when Joanna and Ben brought you this code and this little project they've been working on? What was your reaction?

11:54Joanna Stern:I guess first I was just like super impressed and glad to see more people messing around with this kind of stuff because these coding agents kind of turned everybody into a developer, which is exciting for me because that means you can be doing more things and all of the responsibility doesn't necessarily fall down to one person when it comes to building tools or building things.

12:17Ryan Knutson:But as Brian dug into the code, he saw that not everything was perfect.

12:21Joanna Stern:At first, I saw a lot of outdated practices in the code looking like it had been coded in the late 90s. There were significant problems with accessibility. You couldn't really use the keyboard to do things. If you were using a screen reader, you'd have no idea what was going on. the styles needed updating. It would have clashed with stuff on the page. It did stuff that would have kind of made the rest of the page look like a mess if we'd left it in there. Oh, and there was a bug.

12:51Ryan Knutson:There were a few bugs. So if you were to give it a percentage of just going from, like, was it 100 % done, 90 % done? How would you give it a grade?

13:05Ryan Knutson:I'd say 80%. It was pretty close. 80 % sounds like a lot.

13:10Joanna Stern:Yeah. Here's our colleague Ben again. This is also like a really instructive example. Like code might get you 90 % of the way there, but for that 10%, humans are not just valuable, but kind of essential, right? Like this whole thing doesn't happen without that last 10%.

13:27Ryan Knutson:Still, the process was a lot more efficient.

13:30Ben Cohen:I have built many of these types of projects here over my years at the Wall Street Journal, working with our development team, working with our great graphics and design team. And projects like this can take weeks. If it's a really big project where you've got a lot of deep reporting and you need it to look really perfect. This, as we were saying, took seconds and two days to get from start of idea to finish.

13:51Ryan Knutson:I asked Brian, the computational journalist, if Claude Code made him worried about his job. Not really.

13:58Joanna Stern:As someone who uses Claude Code all day, every day, I feel safe because I, maybe I'm being short-sighted, but it seems like the more I use these things and the more I build with them, there's a limit to how satisfying the result is without a person seriously directing it and adjusting what it's producing. There's a lot of technical know-how when it comes to knowing what to tell it to do.

14:29Ryan Knutson:Brian thinks it will have an impact on jobs, but it's unclear exactly what that impact will be.

14:35Joanna Stern:It's lowering the bar for coding projects. It allows us to be more ambitious. And so if you think of a company that has maybe one or two engineers and they want to do an ambitious project, before this, you'd need to scale up, staff up, five, 10, 20 people working on it. But with coding agents, you can get to that level with only one or two people. So I think the optimistic case is you'll have maybe companies with lower headcount, with fewer engineers working for them, but more companies with engineers building things because they can do it with these coding agents.

15:11Ryan Knutson:This is how Boris Cherny at Anthropic is using the tool he created as something to dramatically increase his productivity.

15:19Joanna Stern:A year ago, 10 % of his code was coming from CloudCode. Six months ago, 50 % of his code was coming from CloudCode. Now, over the past two months, he has not written a single line of code by hand himself. 100 % of his code is coming from CloudCode.

15:33Ryan Knutson:Not only that, Churny now starts his day by spinning up multiple cloud coding agents at once, effectively creating a small team of robot developers. He calls this multi-clouding.

15:44Ben Cohen:It's the idea that you can have these agents doing various tasks for you at the same time, like you would have a team. He has a sort of good system that works across all of the devices. And he told us he launches it, he's like, fix this issue or make this new feature. And so these agents, these cloud codes are just working on that while he's getting ready for work. and while he's commuting to work. He's constantly managing his multi-clawed team.

16:10Joanna Stern:His little team of agents.

16:12Ben Cohen:Yeah.

16:12Joanna Stern:There's something crazy and also profound about this, which is that he is no longer a coder. He is a manager of, like, this fleet of robot coders that are working on his behalf.

16:25Ryan Knutson:But, like, in the past, he wouldn't be managing a team of robots. He'd be managing a team of junior coders. So doesn't this mean that this could take out, like, a whole layer of entry-level jobs for people?

16:36Ben Cohen:This is the biggest question. This is the biggest question right now. All others in the AI industry are wondering the same exact thing.

16:46Ryan Knutson:So what's your sense of how disruptive this particular version of the technology is going to be in the workplace? Like, do you think people are going to lose their jobs as this starts to become more widely used?

16:56Ben Cohen:People are losing their jobs, first of all. we need to accept that there are certain industries where people are already losing their jobs.

17:04Joanna Stern:It's clear that, like, there are certain professions and occupations where people are going to be able to take advantage of this. And the implications of that are, like, very uncertain right now. Like, what the productivity implications are, what the workforce displacement implications are, like, I don't think we really know what they're going to be yet. What we do know is that, there are fields where this is coming if it's not already here.

17:30Ryan Knutson:Here's Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei talking at a recent Wall Street Journal event.

17:35Joanna Stern:There are whole jobs, whole careers that we built for decades that may not be present. And, you know, I think we can deal with it. I think we can adjust to it. But I don't think there's an awareness at all of what is coming here and the magnitude of it. And the thing that is both thrilling and like deeply terrifying, as Joanna has written many times over the past few years, this is the worst and dumbest that these AI models are ever going to be, right? Like what we are playing with now is only going to get better in the days and weeks and especially months and years to come.

18:14Ryan Knutson:In the last few days, Anthropic added new features to CloudCode, including a tool that can review legal contracts and perform other industry-specific functions. It's also released tools for finance and customer service. Then, on Monday, OpenAI updated similar tools. In response, investors started dumping shares of companies they worried could be most vulnerable to disruption.

18:38Ben Cohen:And how much did investors lose? some$300 billion in value.

18:42Joanna Stern:Software names getting hit again today after the sell-off yesterday amid these fears of AI disrupting the industry.

18:48Ben Cohen:Piper Sandler downgraded a few stocks there, Adobe, Freshworks, Vertex.

18:53Ryan Knutson:The concern is that this could be an existential crisis for some companies. Why pay for software solutions when you can now build your own far more easily using something like Cloud Code? In one or five or 10 years, looking back on the development of AI, how big of a moment would you say the release of cloud code will be thought to be?

19:16Ben Cohen:I think it goes to one of the quotes that we had from Boris Churney, which is this is a major democratizing moment in coding and in AI development. And this will have been the moment that some company, whether it's Google or OpenAI, saw as crap. We got to make that thing right now because everyone's going to want to make a new app or a new tool that's going to better themselves. And so this, that is that moment right now.

19:43Joanna Stern:Also, OpenAI had a ChatGPT moment. Google really had like the Gemini 3 nano banana moment a few months ago. This is that moment for Anthropic. Like this is like the breakout moment for one of the top frontier labs that, you know, at this time next year might very well be one of the most valuable companies in the world.

20:25Thank you.

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