Everyone’s vibe coding

0:00Today Explains, Sean Rameswaram here with a confession. When I think about AI, I mostly think about how long it's going to be before the machines come for my job. The Washington Post has already launched an AI-generated news podcast, The Washington Post. The good news, it makes factual errors, so my job is safe for now. But AI is already out here replacing jobs. And one of the first jobs it appears to be replacing is, ironically, web developer. Because everyone is vibe coding now. If you're not familiar, Vibe Coding is writing code through conversation. You tell the AI software what you want using your words, and it tries to build it using generative AI models.

0:40Got to build a site for your small business? Vibe Codes. Got to sketch out some ideas for your tech behemoth? Vibe Codes. And you've got your choice of services, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and something called Lovable, which I'm going to use to build a website for your listening pleasure on Today Explained from Vox. Score more with the college-branded Venmo Debit Card and earn up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash. Got paid back? With the Venmo Debit Card, you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want, like game day snacks, gear, tickets, and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn.

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1:51Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. You're listening to Today Explained. This is the irony of vibe coding, which is that we probably are going to build an entire website and machine right now, and we're still just like, how can we get Zoom to work?

2:18Okay, can you see? I can see it now. Lauren Good, senior correspondent at Wired. We asked you here today to talk about vibe coding, which we haven't really talked about on this show before. I did a little HTTP back in middle school, a Ahrefs and company, but it's been like a minute. And now it turns out I don't have to know how to code to build a website. So the question was, like, what kind of website should we build? So I had this idea to build a website because I feel like a lot of the anxiety around AI is about how soon it's going to steal all of our jobs. So I thought, let's build a website that tells you if you've been replaced by AI.

2:56I love it. I love it. What's it called? That's a great question. Your job explained. You're old. This is a little box cross-branding. I like that. Here we go. Create a website that where I'm going to say where I can input a job and then it will tell me a simple yes or no if my job has been replaced by AI. Let's see what it says. It says thinking, evaluating AI job replacement risk drivers. Tell us what is happening right now while we wait for the AI. So right now, this is retrieving information from one of the AI models that Lovable is using on the back end. And it's basically scanning through massive, massive amounts of data and using predictive technology to basically guess what the best answer is to your prompt.

4:02And so it's not crawling the web, right, in the way that Google works. And it's not necessarily generating something whole cloth like the way that people are talking about how AI is going to replace us in writing or creative fields. This is basically just saying it's pulling together a tool set for you based on the data set that the AI model is built on. Okay. It says, thought for 50 seconds. I'll build the verdict. Oh, God.

4:34A brutalist binary AI job replacement tool with dramatic color transitions and sharp typography. Wow, they named it for me too. The verdict. Interesting. Okay, maybe it is actually trying to be creative. And it just says your labor comma quantified in kind of voxy style. And then it's got a grayish font. It says job title where you're supposed to type your job title. But we, Sean, it feels obvious that where it says job title, we have to type in journalist. I couldn't agree more because we're selfish. OK, here we go. Journalist. Here we go. Pressing enter. Yes. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yes is bad. Oh, our risk level.

5:20It's in bright red. Yes is a huge font. And the risk level below that, it says the risk level, the time frame in which we're going to be replaced. And then the action that we need to take. Honestly, this looks like CENTCOM. This is like very, okay. And our risk level, Sean, is critical, 82%. Critical, 82%. Time frame, 2025, 2028. Pivot to investigative work. Now, Sean, the thing with vibe coding is that if you didn't like some element of this, and not just the response, but the actual design of it, I mean, this is where you can just type in another prompt and iterate on it. And like, we have to know no coding.

6:01But I would say right now in Silicon Valley, when, you know, some people are very bullish on this, other people are saying, no, you're still going to need to have some foundational knowledge and understanding of how to code and how it works. But there's absolutely no doubt that right now within tech companies, there are employees using this tech to basically do way more coding than they've ever done before. When did everyone start Vibe Coding? If you're not using Claude code, you need to start because how did I just completely redesign my portfolio in a day as a designer who doesn't really know how to code?

6:36I built an app with zero card and here's my tech stack and exactly how much I spent. Here's everything I vibe coded this week and how long it took me. This is something that's really taken the software industry by storm over the past year or so. And the phrase vibe coding took off when a well-known AI researcher, Andre Karpathy, used it. There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. And in a lot of ways, this has been kind of like the fever dream of Silicon Valley for a while. I don't know if you used to watch HBO's show Silicon Valley, Sean, but there's a really great clip where one of the engineers admits that he has been allowing an AI to code for him.

7:23You gave your AI permission to overwrite code in the internal file system? Were you going to tell me about this? No. I thought that was the company policy these days. And the founder of the company is just horrified by it and saying, you can't allow the AI to do this. It's going to basically mess everything up. Well, that moment has arrived. We've spoken a lot about various risks that come with our rapid adoption of AI tools. What are the risks when it comes to vibe coding? On one hand, there's the risk that the code that's being generated just isn't very good. There's something in the tech industry that's known as technical debt, which basically means that you get into a lot of debt with the tech that you've built.

8:11And then you have to spend a lot of time and resources and capital to basically fix it. There are also some security risks that come with deploying these AI agents. I don't know if you've heard of something called Claws, Sean. Like Santa? Claws are sort of taking AI agents and coding bots to the next level where they've become a lot more autonomous and they run locally on someone's machine. And this is something that like Silicon Valley is very excited about right now. You can basically run them on a Mac Mini and have it do a whole bunch of stuff for you on your machine. But in order to do that, you have to give it access to a bunch of information.

8:47So whether you're using a coding bot in your work or whether you're running Claws on your personal computer, you are basically telling this agent, here's some access to some of the most sensitive information on my machine or in the cloud. Build something with it. So there are security concerns for you, the vibe coder. I wonder if that means there are security concerns for me, the person visiting like a vibe coded website. Is there a chance, like if I'm inputting personal information to a website like this, that their security isn't up to snuff? I think that's certainly possible. Yeah. I mean, there's the possibility that someone literally just isn't using like basic HTTPS level of security on their website or they're, you know, they haven't really considered a privacy policy that they're supposed to implement before they start running this website and collecting people's data.

9:45But the train has left the station. Like everyone is jumping over to Vibe Coding because it's just so much cheaper, so much easier and so much faster. Yeah, I mean, you probably know this, Sean, but Silicon Valley is pretty obsessed with productivity. In fact, there's a phrase that's known as 10x amongst the engineering crowd. That sort of describes a person who outputs 10x the amount of work that's really expected of them, that they're like hyper-efficient and productive. For the sake of it, I'm just going to say aiming high, I'm going to define it as aiming at least 10x. It is very important that whatever it is you do has to be 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or 10 times faster, maybe ideally all three, than the competition, than the existing solutions.

10:31But now with Vibe Coding, the idea that you could run two or three coding agents at the same time and, you know, manage them like they're interns, check in on them from time to time, but that they're basically doing the coding for you. It's like this pipe dream that maybe if we use AI to do our work for us, we might only have to work a four day work week or free up some time so we can like sit on our patio and drink lemonade. That's not really what's happening here. What's happening here is that everyone just expects everyone to do a lot more. And that's definitely the case with software engineering.

11:11Lauren Good with an E writes for Wired.com, also with an E. You know how the normies vibe code now, but when we're back, you're going to hear how the coders are doing it. And it's a whole different vibe.

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15:01This is an artificial intelligence version of Drake and you are listening to today's plan.

15:12My name is Clive Thompson. I'm the author of Coders, the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. And I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. And you just spent a lot of time hanging out with coders who were vibe coding. And from what I could tell from reading your piece in New York Times Magazine about your experience is that they're not vibe coding the same way that Lauren and I were just vibe coding earlier in the show. No, they're doing something that's a lot more aggressive, I guess, and ambitious. What they're doing is they are using multiple agents, kind of swarms of agents at the same time.

15:53So they will have, you know, if they're using Claude code or codex by, you know, by OpenAI or Gemini by Google, they will have it kind of wired into their laptops. So those agents can like create files, destroy files. They can create new folders. They can take code that's been written. They can push it, you know, live into production in the world, you know, and they will also work like little teams. So when they want to create a piece of software, sometimes they'll write like a spec, like a page saying, here's what I want it to do. Or sometimes they'll just talk, you know, to the agent. But they'll be kind of talking to the lead agent that's like going to be the head of the team.

16:35And they'll talk to it and say, you know, here's what I want you to do. You know, what do you think? You know, give me your ideas. And they'll sort of go back and forth, like generating a plan. And when they are confident that this top agent understands what is to be done, they'll say, all right, go do it. And that one will spawn off several sub-agents. Wow. It will have one agent that's writing code, another one that is testing the code, only when it has sort of written it and it passed a lot of tests. They're like confident, okay, now we'll show it to the human, right? And so it's quite wild to sort of watch them do this.

17:13I'll be sitting next to them and they'll be like, you know, having this conversation with the lead agent, you know. What's our plan? What's your plan? What are you going to do? Tell me. I don't think that's quite the way I should do it. Let's do it this way, you know. And sometimes, you know, if it does something wrong, like they'll have to sort of yell at it, right? You know, like sometimes it'll be like, yeah, boss, you know, I didn't really think those tests were necessary, so I didn't do them. Like literally, it will like just do that. And then this coder will go like, no, you have to pass the test.

17:46Go back and do it. And they'll often have to use kind of emotional language. Like they'll be like, this is unacceptable. Or they'll say things like, you know, this is embarrassing. You're humiliating me, you know. It's very, very weird. This was something that stuck out in your piece was that in a prompt, one of your coders said, don't embarrass yourself. And I said to him, I said, what's up with that? Does that language improve the sort of output of these agents? And he was like, I couldn't prove it. But generally, we find that when we sort of reprimand them a little bit, yeah, they become a little more reliable.

18:28And again, it sort of sounds bonkers, but when you think about it, large language models are language machines, right? So it sort of registers embarrassing as having a bunch of, being in a bad neighborhood, like a neighborhood you don't want to go to, right? And so probably that does help, you know, the AI sort of register that, oh, this instruction here is actually serious in a way that the other ones were not. Where I was noticing how much time the models were saving me while building an elementary website, can you help us understand just how much time money, humans, human labor is being saved by vibe coding at the level that you observed?

19:18Yeah. It can be really, really significant. It is most significant. Those time savings, those productivity increases, they are most significant when someone is building something new from scratch. So the startup founders, one or two person, three person shops, they're like, I need to get to market fast. Like there might be 10 other people with this idea. I got to beat them. It's dizzying. Some of those people were telling me that, they were working like 20 times faster than they would on their own. That stuff that would normally have taken them a day now takes, you know, half an hour. But at a very large and mature company like Amazon or Google, you know, you've got billions of lines of existing code.

20:00They're out there, they're running, customers are relying on it. And if you, one little part of it stops working, that could cascade through everything. So those folks are, you know, they're definitely using the agents, but they are less likely to be pushing rapidly out stuff. They're more likely to be looking carefully at it and putting it through what's known as code review, where multiple humans look at it and go, oh, okay, does that work? You know, that might have problems with this other thing. That might have an unintended consequence that the agent didn't really understand because the agent doesn't have the mental picture of how all of this massive fang company works that I, the human, has in my head.

20:36So for them, basically, it's like a 10 % improvement in terms of the velocity of productivity of the engineers, how fast they go from having an idea to making it happen. And like, you know, it's really interesting. And you may have discovered this too in your vibe coding. I've certainly discovered my vibe coding. A lot of engineers told me up and down the food chain that in some respects, it was even less about speed than about the ability to experiment with a bunch of ideas and see which one might really work. Without having to invest the time in. Right, exactly. Because in the before times, you have an idea for a feature.

21:11All right, are you really going to spend six weeks developing it just to discover that it's not really what you thought it was going to be? Whereas now, you know, well, let's just do 10 different versions of that over the next week. And let's look at all of them. And then we can pick the one we want. So you might not necessarily have gone faster. But the feature that you've got is exactly the one you wanted. and you kind of know because you felt it, you held it in your hands, you know? You mentioned Google, of course, a lot of tech layoffs in the past few years. And now we're talking about, you know, how vibe coding has dramatically overturned the norms in engineering.

21:50How are developers feeling about that? Surely there's some tension there. I think you call it a civil war in your piece. Yeah, well, here's the thing. So there is definitely a civil war insofar as there is a, the majority of people that I spoke to, and I reached out to a very wide array. I talked to 75 developers and I actively wanted to talk to ones that didn't like AI because I wanted to know their feelings. It's a minority of people that are really hotly opposed, but they're very, very strongly opposed. They don't like the fact that these are trained on stolen materials. They don't like the fact that it uses tons of energy.

22:23They don't like the fact that they think it's going to de-skill. And then this poor performing code will be used to train new AI models, creating a vicious cycle of terrible software we'll all have to learn to live with. I don't care that you made an app in one hour. What does the back end look like? It's not modular. It looks like shit. Join me in making the serious dev movement. No more vibe coding. Why do you think they're not the majority when this is so clearly going to replace so many of them and bypass all of their ethical, moral concerns and objections?

23:02I think it's because for a lot of developers, it's just been a delightful experience in the short term of going from like everything being a slow slog to it being like, oh my God, I'm just all these ideas and things I wanted to do. I can now try them and do them. Being able to just vibe code anything you think of, like spend 30 minutes and you have a tool that just does stuff for you. it makes you feel limitless. It's just a constant novelty factor. Like you start working on something and usually when you hit the point of like, I'm like bored and I've got this other better idea and I should like start on that and then come back to this.

23:36Like you can't do that now, but like everything can actually get finished. Cause it's fun basically. It's enormously fun. Like it's, the pleasure of coding used to be, you know, you wanted to make something. And so you wanted that to exist. But along the way, there were a lot of these little wins when you fixed a bug, when you got something working. those little wins have gone away because you're not doing that bug fixing you're not doing that line writing so the big wins are just coming like in avalanches and it's very intoxicating they also you know there are ones who like essentially don't think that those bad labor things are going to are going to obtain like they're like well it's probably maybe true that you know we lose some jobs here but they think there's a potential that more will get created in areas that they have previously been unable to be created.

24:30Give it five years for us. I mean, from what you gathered talking to people in the industry, from being someone who codes yourself, does this hearken the, you know, end of computer programming as we know it? It seems like probably. And if so, where does it go from here? No, I would not go so far as to say that it ends it in five years. I do think it becomes something very, very different, potentially. Like, I still think everyone told me, and I believe them, that you still need some understanding of the way a code base works and things happen at a computer science level, at a computer engineering level, to do the complicated things.

25:13I think actually, weirdly, what you might see is something a little different, which is the explosion of code in areas where there is currently none. Like, there's a bazillion people out there that are code adjacent, right? So you work in accounting. You're a wizard at Excel. Like, you have these, you know, these Excel spreadsheets are like 7 ,000 rows wide and whatnot and runs all this logic and you can import data. If you're given the ability now to have, you know, an agent say, okay, like, could you bring more data in or could you do these things? There is going to be this really weird world where there's a lot of customized software for an audience of like two people, right?