How To Become a Vibe Coder

0:00Hey, this is Mike. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with the local station KQED. Lauren and I will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and we'll have a special guest joining us for a conversation that you will not want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We cannot wait to see you there. Hi, Lauren. Hey, Mike. How are you doing? I am vibing. How are you doing? I'm glad to hear it. You'll be so proud of me for something that I did this weekend.

0:38Tell us. I used the word compute as a noun. What inspired this momentous occasion? I'm so ashamed. Okay. But somebody was telling me about their project, and I said, that sounds like it's going to take a lot of compute. You didn't say compute power. You just said compute. Yeah. And you let it dangle. Yeah. And what did they say? They agreed and nodded and moved on because it's been accepted to use the word compute improperly as a noun. It's short for computing resources or computing power. Yes. But all, you know, the AI people say compute as like a thing that exists in the world, which it is not.

1:20Computers are things that exist in the world. And what do computers do? They compute, right? It's a verb. Mike is shaking his fist at the clouds right now. I really am. Yeah, but you did it. No, I'm not proud of it. It slipped out. It's just because I'm immersed. I'm soaking in Silicon Valley. Why does its usage as a noun bother you so much? It's a personal thing. And you can't fight the youth. You can't push back against this big wave of language trend. You just have to accept it. And I'm learning to accept it, that people are just using compute, quote unquote, improperly all the time now. and it's just part of our lives.

1:58First of all, I'm proud of you. Thank you. Second of all, if you want to talk about it later, I'm here for you. And third, let's see if we can get through this entire show in which we are going to be talking about a lot of AI and not use the word compute as a noun. Do you think we can do it? Let's try. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we're vibing. We're going to talk about vibe coding. Basically, giving plain language prompts to AI models and letting them do the coding. It's sometimes called AI-assisted code or code gen for code generation.

2:35And it's all everyone is talking about in the engineering departments right now. Some tech companies have estimated that 30 to 40 percent of their code is now written by AI. But what does it look like in practice? Lauren, you now have firsthand experience with this, right? About a month ago, you embedded with a well-known San Francisco-based startup that has completely embraced the trend of vibe coding. You asked to join their engineering team, and for some reason, they let you. They did. It's still a mystery to me why they said yes, but they did, and I live to tell the tale. Are you going to leave us and go become a vibe coder now?

3:08Safe to say, not yet. I still love Wired. I still love journalism. But I did have a really interesting glimpse into the future of work. Well, I can't wait to hear all about it. Let's do it. I'm Michael Colori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. I'm Lauren Gunn. I'm a senior correspondent.

3:30So Lauren, take us to the beginning of this reporting assignment for you. What attracted you not to just look into Vibe Coding, but want to actually try it out yourself? Part of it was curiosity around how tech companies are embracing Vibe Coding right now and drastically changing their engineering teams, the structure of their engineering teams, how they hire, how they lay off based on this rise in vibe coding and AI-assisted code. And part of it was my own curiosity around whether my neural pathways could be reorganized in such a way that I could learn something new. I've been doing the same thing in this job here for a long time.

4:09You have too, I know. And we're constantly responding to news, reacting, evolving as journalists, but it's different from really having your head sort of deep in like the tech space. And I thought, well, let me see if I could actually learn this. Supposedly, it's really easy now to code because of AI. So what was the company where you embedded? It's Notion. Okay. Are you familiar with Notion? It's a to-do list app? It is, in a sense, a to-do list app, though I'm sure the founders of Notion would describe it as a bit more than that. Sorry. Notion is a well-funded startup that's been around since the early 2010s.

4:44It has about 1 ,000 employees. It's based in downtown San Francisco. and when the founders originally created Notion, they built it in the idea of this low-code, no-code mindset, which was kind of going to help people code stuff, but like not have to code. It turns out they were a little early to that and people just use Notion for like to-do lists, templates, diagrams, spreadsheets, that sort of thing. It does have an AI assistant built into it and now because of the rise of Vibe Coding, the company is kind of fashioning that AI assistant into something a little bit more agentic. And so they're sort of coming full circle back to this original idea of like, how can people do sort of low code, no code projects in Notion?

5:26Because we're all Vibe coding now. I mean, the app itself is a bit of a learning curve. It has about 100 million users and people are either really into Notion or like you just don't really use Notion because you're using like Apple Notes or Google Keep and that's totally fine for you. Okay. So they said yes. They said yes. You can come in. And Vibe code with us. So you went there in July. I did. So what's Notion like as a company, as a workplace, new employee, Lauren Good? There's this feeling, I know, and I don't have to worry about getting fired either, so I can really say whatever I want. There's this feeling of walking into Notion that feels a little bit like you're in this 2010s time portal of startups.

6:06They're in a really nice building downtown. There's a jazz club downstairs. They have a, you know, a well-stocked kitchen. They get lunch delivered every day. There's a Bevy machine. Have you heard of Bevy? It's like capital B-E-V-I? That is correct. And it's like make sodas, right? Yeah, make sodas. Yeah, someone actually coded a little app internally to check which syrups are available for the sodas. It seems like a fairly symbiotic workforce. And they had a desk waiting for me with like a tote bag and stickers and a welcome note. I had done a little bit of onboarding beforehand. And because they were not going to set me up on my laptop in their IDE, their internal coding tool.

6:45Yeah, they set me up. I was pair programming. So I was paired up with engineers who knew what they were doing. What was the first project that you worked on? I worked on something called a mermaid diagram. It's like basically a type of flow chart that exists within Notion and exists in general. And you know when you make something in an app and then you want to expand it or zoom into it to look at it more closely? The files that were being generated as mermaid charts in Notion were static. They were static SVG files, and so you couldn't expand them. And it was very annoying for users because they can't actually read the little text that's within this chart.

7:24Oh, okay. So I did some vibe coding with two other coders to make these charts expandable. Okay. And so what were the tools that you were using to do the vibe coding? A lot of them use Cursor, which is a well-known AI coding platform. But then within Cursor, you select the different AI models that you want to use. In many cases, they were using Anthropics Claude or Claude Code. So you'd go into Cursor, you would choose your model, which I like to say is like a choose your player moment. So I know this primarily from reading Wired, but Claude is the preferred model for people doing Vibe coding right now?

7:59Is that right? It is right now. What's interesting about this is when I was embedded with Notion, it was about a month before OpenAI was announcing GPT-5, which is supposed to be a coding collaborator. And some people say that OpenAI was taking direct aim at Anthropics Cloud when they did this. Basically, there were some model releases earlier this year that really tipped Cloud Code into the category of, like, this is legitimately very good for coding. Okay. So you've got Cursor. You selected Claude as your model that you're going to be using. And then, like, what happens? What do you do? Yeah, I mean, this is the part where if you've never coded before and someone gives you an assignment, it's a little bit stultifying because you are like, logically, what do I do?

8:43And this is where the pair programming came in handy because I had these experienced coders saying, well, first, you want to sort of back into the problem. You can use the AI assistant to ask what's wrong with this. And then so we asked, like, what's going on with the mermaid diagrams in this app? And then once you have an assessment or a diagnosis of what's wrong, you can take that information from the AI and then craft your prompt for how you want to fix it. What did you type in or like what did you say to it in order to get it working on it? Well, some of this had been pre-written by an ocean engineer, but we then took Claude's notes and we sort of incorporated them into that.

9:21And here's basically what I ended up typing into cursor. First, we created a ticket that said, add full screen forward slash zoom to mermaid diagrams. Clicking on the diagram should zoom it in full screen. And then we took some notes from Notions Internal Slack where folks had said mermaid diagrams should be zoom full screenable, just like uploaded pages. They're just SVGs, which is scalable vector graphics. So we can probably go from SVG to data URL to image component if we want to Zoom. So it was telling Cursor exactly what we wanted and then making a suggestion for how that workflow should go.

10:01People have different approaches for how much they want to babysit the AI. But we managed to fix in under 40 minutes, I would say. Under 40 minutes? Yeah, combined. And that's actually a feature that ended up going from development to production to shipping. So it's working now in Notion. Wow. So how did it feel to fix this feature in Notion just by using Vibe Coding? Honestly, it felt pretty cool. I did feel like I was maybe reorganizing my neural pathways a little bit, learning a little bit more. A few caveats, of course, which is that none of the problems we are solving were particularly complex.

10:38I was pair programming, so I had much more experienced engineers there with me, basically, you know, hand-holding. and a lot of what we were working on was front-end stuff. It wasn't like going deep into the weeds or the infrastructure and that sort of thing. But I had this moment of feeling a little bit like this anonymous hyper-logical God who was pulling levers and then like shipping the thing to 100 million people. That's pretty amazing. You have a line in your piece, which I really love, which is, I'm quoting you now, time is inversed in the land of vibes. Projects that used to take your whole career are now done in days while commands you expect to see executed in seconds take endless minutes.

11:18Tell me about this. I mean, well, I guess like just if you go back to the earliest days of computing and how long it would take for a computer to do what a computer was doing, which relative to doing it by hand was fast. But then our expectation levels change every time we sort of level up in computing. Or like we've talked before about the earliest days of dial-up. right? Which is going away, RIP dial-up, AOL. But it felt endless logging on. But at the same time, it was remarkable. You were connecting to all of these people within minutes. And so now with vibe coding, this thing happens where we're very quickly as consumers of technology getting used to using ChatGPT, for example, and just getting this reasonable sounding, even if not totally accurate answer spit out to us in natural language in seconds.

12:11When you're vibe coding, you are still seeing the AI assistant take a lot of time to process the code. You're watching lines and lines and lines of code stream before you. So it's a lot of sitting around and waiting, honestly, after you have figured out the prompt. So that's what I mean by this concurrent thing happening where there's like a miraculous, almost miraculous feeling technology happening in front of your eyes. And also you're like, why isn't it going faster? So aside from that, what else was really surprising about this time you spent at Notion? I think the most surprising thing after I finished working on a few different features, all with, you know, in a pair, pair programming, was that I had the chance to actually just talk to the folks there about how they were feeling about this being such a big part of their jobs.

12:59And there was some enthusiastic embrace of it, and there was some forced feelings around it. Like, this is just the way the industry is going, so we have to embrace it. And I asked people if they felt worried about jobs. And one person said to me, well, look, it's not as though one coder can now do the job of 100 coders. It's that that one coder is going to become 100 times more productive. Someone else said to me, look, when you're working on really complex problems in code, a lot of what you're doing is actually the reasoning, the diagnosis of what's wrong, the planning to fix it. And then maybe 30 % of the time is the actual coding.

13:36This person also said, I think that it's going to be like a lot of prototyping and like rapid sort of coding, small fixes that VibeCoding is most useful for. So there was this sense from people working there that both, well, this is absolutely the future and we need to adjust our workforce and our workflow because everyone's going to be VibeCoding, but also we're still pretty confident that there's going to be a human in the loop.

14:02Let's take a break right now. and when we come back, Lauren and I are going to break down the ways in which vibe coding has been shaping the tech industry and whether it really spells the end of coding as we know it.

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14:59So Lauren, based on what you were telling us about your experience at Notion, where you were able to fix some features on their platform using VibeCoding and paired with some engineers, it still feels like what you accomplished in such a short time would have been unthinkable even just two years ago. So how necessary is it for developers to learn how to code in a traditional way? Is that something that is still encouraged or are people just like all in on VibeCoding now? I think what we're seeing happen in the talent market at this moment in Silicon Valley, which of course will change three months from now, is that there is this incredibly high demand for people who are really deep in the weeds on AI research.

15:37We're seeing this happen with Meta hiring for its superintelligence lab and then open AI countering and then people trying to steal talent from Mira Morati's lab. And, you know, it's like this talent war that's happening where people who are deeply steeped in AI are getting offered nine-figure salaries. I think that that's not going to go away. The salaries being offered might change, But having real subject matter expertise in programming, software programming, the way it works, I just can't imagine that with the way the world is moving technologically that that's going to change. Then I think on the other hand, there might be some instances of people who are coming in from different learned disciplines in college or not even having gone to college at all who are going to take on some of these jobs that are basically like hand-holding for AI.

16:24The question for them becomes whether or not they're training AI to eventually replace them. There's this middle ground of, you know, engineering managers that I don't really know enough about to say whether or not their jobs are going to be affected by AI, like what that does for the coding industry. But it's a good question. It's certainly something we're watching really closely here at Wired. That feels like such a cop-out, but it's like I really just don't. I mean, all of this changes so fast. Yeah, yeah. And it's hard to say from just spending like a week at a company. Exactly. And we'll read reports that say, well, you know, consultants' jobs, for example, are on the line because of AI.

17:00But then you talk to some people who say, yeah, but the AI still is somewhat incompetent at this very specific thing that I do. And you still need a human to oversee that. The folks that you worked with at Notion kept referring to them as like really good interns. Yeah, interns. The AI models and like the commands they were sending out. It's like they get it mostly right and it takes them a while, but it helps. Yeah, there was something inherently a little bit paternalistic about that. And also, it was interesting, one of the co-founders who I spoke to, Simon Last, at one point at Notion had been in an engineering managing role and decided he didn't want to be a manager anymore.

17:38So now he's what you'd call a super IC, a super, you know, individual contributor to the technical product. He, at one point, had been using three different vibe coding tools at the same time and told me it just felt like I was managing interns. And so now I just stick to just one. So, yeah, the tools themselves, they still need to be watched. Even as they move closer to, like, the buzzword agentic, where they're supposedly just, like, you fire them up and let them run. You still need to, I mean, you are writing code that is underpinning your entire product. You need to check on it. So, on that note, I want to play a clip that we should talk about.

18:11This is Dario Amadei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. He said this at an event for the Council of Foreign Relations back in March of this year. We are not far from the world. I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90 % of the code. And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code. Okay, let's fact check Dario. When did he say that? He said that in March. Okay, so it's been a few months. Yeah, it's been close to six months. I don't think it's 90 % of the code. Yeah. Based on what we're tracking and what large tech companies like Microsoft and Google have said most recently, it's not at 90 % of the code.

18:54It could get there. In general, I think what's happening with AI right now, and particularly from some of the frontier model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, is that its leaders tend to make these statements that I find to be very self-aggrandizing. Like, we need to prepare for AGI. Yeah. And the idea is that they think they're going to attain AGI. AGI is also kind of this, it's hard to define. Some people would posit that we've already achieved that because the AI models are doing reasoning at the level of humans. I think Dario is saying something like in six months, 90 % of code is going to be written by Anthropic would obviously be a very beneficial situation for Anthropic because then they would have all these enterprise customers paying for clawed code to just run code all day.

19:38So, you know, they're prognosticating, they're putting themselves out there, but ultimately, like, they see the upside. Right. And so in your experience and from your reporting, not only in this story, but other stories about this trend, we're not going to see a bunch of experienced developers retiring right now because they still need to be in the loop. Given that, how is this boom in vibe coding or AI-assisted coding dictating where all the money is going right now in Silicon Valley? Oh, it's affecting a lot. But I think right now what's happening broadly in AI investing is that investors are looking closely at whether or not a company is just kind of like a wrapper.

20:14Like they build some feature on top of other AI models. And then that little startup has to pay for access to those models and also try to lure in customers. And it becomes this like really hard balance. But I think that there are other startups like Cursor, for example, which is made by a company called AnySphere, has raised, I think,$900 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital. It has a bunch of big clients like Notion, obviously, but OpenAI, Instacart, MidJourney, Discord. I think even Sundar Pichai said something once about how he's been playing around with Cursor. It's become a little bit of like the Kleenex of IDE right now.

20:48Like everyone's talking about using Cursor when they're talking about Vibe coding. I think a lot of investors are seeing value in a service like that that has gained this user base and mindshare early on. And it's providing like a development platform just for Vibe coding. All right. So if everybody's vibe coding and not everybody is experienced enough to know whether or not the output is quality, what does that mean for the software that we're all using? Like, are companies shipping bad code because they're just vibe coding everything and they don't have the people to, quote unquote, monitor the interns, babysit the AI?

21:25Right. Are you asking if I shipped bad code, Mike? Because the answer is absolutely yes. I would never. I would never. So I asked Ivan Zaudes, who is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. I asked him a couple different ways. So he had a couple different answers. One of his answers was good and bad quality is subjective in code. If the code is correct, it runs. If it's bad or incorrect, it's not going to work. It's different from you or I writing a story, which of course has to be correct as well. But someone could look at the way we structure a sentence or have written a feature story for Wired and say that was good or bad.

22:03You know, with code, it's sort of like the end game is that it has to work, it has to run. Then I kept pressing though, like, but isn't there this kind of degradation of quality of code over time, particularly if the inputs are bad and then eventually the AI outputs are bad? And he said, well, Simon will just build a tool that like helps us track that before it ships. So it was funny because it was like putting a human back in the loop again. I think also long-term is a concern. You know, if you have a high turnover rate of engineers and your staff and two years from now, it's a whole new team of engineers who are looking at this code base that was like vibe coded by an associate level engineer and trying to solve a problem in the code base, then I could see how that could potentially be a problem.

22:44Like you'd really want just the code to continue to be high quality because your team's going to have to refer to it for years to come. It's like an archive. And you want, in general, with archiving anything, you want it to be as high quality as possible. Mike, I'm curious, have you done any vibe coding? I hesitate to call it vibe coding, but I have done some vibe music making. What is that like? So there's all these generative music tools that exist where you can kind of give the system very vague instructions about what you want, and then it generates music based on your instructions and you actually make the sounds, but you don't pick the order or the melody or the tempo or anything like that.

23:26And when you want to adjust it, you can tell the system, I would like this 10 BPM faster. I would like half as many notes. I would like this to be in F sharp minor. And then it just kind of makes a song. So I've done some of that. What app are you using? Well, I would recommend for people who are just getting started to try the Bloom pack, which is something that my close personal friend Brian Eno put out many, many years ago at the dawn of the mobile touchscreen era that he and his technology partners have been updating. And now you can get like a bunch of different music making apps that are purely generative that just rely on touchscreen input.

24:07So I think you can get all of the Bloom variations for like under$10 on the App Store. Do you have any interest in trying to VibeCode like an app? Sure. Not right now. I'm just too busy. Sure. I mean, it's interesting. You know, I think anybody who's listened to us talk about it is like, OK, so I can make an app. And is that possible? Can I just like download Cursor and make an app? Cursor is a little bit more advanced. What I hear from people and including our colleague Will Knight, who's been vibe coding some stuff with his son, Replit and Lovable are a little bit more user friendly. Okay. But yeah, I mean, you need to like, you're not only writing the code, but then you need to run it somewhere.

24:48You need to like give it a container or a site to run on. And then it's also like, is this actually a value add? Is this really doing anything? Like I tried to create some kind of plugin essentially that would auto save PDFs for me from certain research websites I was reading. And then I was like, there are like so many Clipper tools and plugins that already do this. Yeah. But yeah, I'd be curious to see what you come up with. Okay. In fact, I'm probably going to quiz you about it on an upcoming show. So this is an official, this is your vibe coding assignment. I better roll up my sleeves and get cracking.