The Rise of 'Vibe Coding': AI Transforms Software Development Landscape

Vibe Coding Is Everywhere. Here's How It Works and 5 Tips for Getting Started

Emily is an experienced reporter who covers cutting-edge tech, from AI and EVs to brain implants. She stays grounded by hiking and playing guitar. With "vibe coding," almost anyone can be a programmer. Just ask an AI to generate code through a ChatGPT-like conversation, and refine the output. This technique is rapidly becoming a popular way for hobbyists to build apps or websites, but professional programmers are also using it at work. An ever-growing list of vibe-coding products are hitting the market -- from big names like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon, to up-and-comers like Replit and Cursor. There's an AI coding gold rush going on; Sweden-based Lovable claims to be the fastest-growing startup ever, Forbes reports. Still, these tools are far from perfect. They require constant re-work, prompt adjustments, and triple-checking the output. In a cautionary tale, one company tried Replit's AI coding agent, and it deleted an entire database without permission. Still, it's worth trying your hand at vibe coding -- to familiarize yourself with the competition, if nothing else. Windsurf is at the center of the vibe-coding world. Google recently hired its co-founder and former CEO in a deal worth approximately $2.4 billion. Days later, Windsurf was acquired by Cognition, which has its own vibe-coding tool, Devin. "We believe sincerely that this technology is going to make everyone a developer," Akshat Agrawal, Windsurf's VP of product and marketing, tells us. "Basically, you don't need coding skills to build an app, which is a huge, change. [But] we definitely haven't figured everything out. There's a long way to go to make these agents really mirror the capabilities of the human software engineer." What Is Vibe Coding? The origin of the term "vibe coding" can be traced back to a February 2025 tweet from OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy. "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," he said. "It's possible because the large language models are getting too good." In short, vibe coding means giving an AI a programming task and letting it complete it for you. It generates the code, makes architecture decisions, and turns a vague concept into reality. "It's kind of a hilarious term," Agrawal says. "But it really refers to, in my opinion, where you're letting the AI do most of the coding." Why did it take more than two years from the launch of ChatGPT for vibe coding to take off? You can thank the industry's push into agentic AI. It's not just about asking a chatbot to spin up a few lines. It can look at files within your code repository, analyze them, and understand them. It can search the internet for information, and access third-party tools. The goal is to "mirror how a human would do work," Agrawal says. Being so hands-off and nontechnical comes with risks. Vibe coders will "often will have to accept that a certain number of bugs and glitches will be present," according to Merriam-Webster's new definition of the term. What's the Vibe-Coding Workflow? People who are vibe coding in their spare time may be using OpenAI's Code Interpreter ($20 per month), or the free versions of Windsurf, Loveable, Replit, or Claude Code. These tools have their own workspaces, so everything is in one place. That's more streamlined than, say, copy and pasting snippets from ChatGPT into your main codebase. You can also take advantage of agentic features and other automations. Professional engineers are likely using enterprise versions of vibe-coding tools, such as Microsoft Copilot. Their companies have vetted them for official use, and the AIs are baked into their Integrated Development Environment (IDE). That's where they write, test, and debug code before pushing it to production. AI coding agents can now do some of this work. Vibe coding for serious engineers is still evolving. Amazon's new Kiro tool aims to offer a more structured approach, starting with upfront planning. Developers can break their projects out into chunks, enter specifications for each part, and then work with the AI to vibe code against those requirements. Kiro even generates technical design documents and performs quality checks. In the most sophisticated tools, multiple AI agents may work on different aspects of your project, each specialized in specific tasks. They all "meet" to discuss and refine the plan. (Elon Musk likens it to a "study group" for his Grok AI chatbot.) Ready to Try It? 5 Expert Tips to Get You Started Here are a few easy ways to get started and elevate your game once you get comfortable. These are just a few tips we've heard from Agrawal, friends, family, and online forums. There's no shortage of vibe coding lore on the web to check out, like this "ultimate guide" from one experienced Redditor. Happy vibing!

AI is transforming how software engineers do their jobs. Just don't call it 'vibe-coding'

One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some call it "vibe-coding" because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there's no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies to make the best one. "The essence of it is you're no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax," said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code. "You're not looking at every single line of code. You're more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish." Wu added, however, that "vibe-coding" is not a term she uses. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the "world's best" for coding and other complex tasks. Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help to organizing meal plans, but the "top use case" for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh. "That is often the first thing large organizations go after," Walsh said. "I think there's broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they're getting the most traction." And while Walsh said Anthropic's products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub. "This is the most competitive space in the industry right now," said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup's office in Mountain View, California. Windsurf's coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it quickly found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf's founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that another AI coding startup, Cognition, acquired in July. "It's been a really volatile time at Windsurf," Wang told employees in a July email as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies' integration is "going really well," Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a fictional setting in SpongeBob SquarePants. Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the "autocorrect" features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves. Anthropic said its new Claude Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent. Anthropic's first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company's Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it. "Over time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic," Wu said. Anthropic, in a consumer usage report earlier this month, said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more "niche" activities on the platform. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks. Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic's Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with when he coined the phrase "vibe-coding" in February. "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," he wrote on X. It was "getting too good," he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and "barely even touch the keyboard" and use it for throwaway weekend projects. "It's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later. Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise. The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient. Walsh said Gartner's position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it." Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' -- ages 22-25 -- in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve about 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier. It's likely to have grown even higher since then. Karpathy didn't respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said. "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

AI is transforming how software engineers do their jobs. Just don't call it 'vibe-coding'

One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some call it "vibe-coding" because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there's no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies to make the best one. "The essence of it is you're no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax," said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code. "You're not looking at every single line of code. You're more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish." Wu added, however, that "vibe-coding" is not a term she uses. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the "world's best" for coding and other complex tasks. Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help to organizing meal plans, but the "top use case" for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh. "That is often the first thing large organizations go after," Walsh said. "I think there's broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they're getting the most traction." And while Walsh said Anthropic's products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub. "This is the most competitive space in the industry right now," said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup's office in Mountain View, California. Windsurf's coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf's founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that Cognition acquired in July. "It's been a really volatile time at Windsurf," Wang wrote to employees in July as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies' integration is "going really well," Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a setting in SpongeBob SquarePants. Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the "autocorrect" features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves. Anthropic said its new Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent. Anthropic's first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company's Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it. "Over time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic," Wu said. Anthropic has said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more "niche" activities. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks. Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic's Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe-coding" in February. "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," he wrote on X. It was "getting too good," he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and "barely even touch the keyboard." "It's not really coding -- I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later. Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise. The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient. Walsh said Gartner's position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it." Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' -- ages 22-25 -- in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier. Karpathy didn't respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said. "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

Ask a techspert: What is vibe coding?

You've heard of coding, and you've definitely heard of vibes. But what do they have to do with each other? Vibe coding is an emerging field of development, thanks to AI. It's helping people build websites, apps and more. To get a better idea of how vibe coding works, why it's becoming increasingly popular and what you can do with it, we talked to product director Kelly Schaefer, who leads a portfolio of AI-powered products in Google Labs. What do you do at Google? My teams and I build what we call "future of" products, which focus on the future of design, writing and even software development. In the software arena, we're thinking about how to democratize building products. It's not just engineers who will be building in the future! And vibe coding can help with that democratization. What's your definition of vibe coding? Vibe coding lets you build what you envisioned in your head even if you don't have traditional coding skills. It's a process where, for example, you can use an AI tool and explain what you want to make and what you want it to look like, and that tool will generate something for you that you can see and use. In the past, you would have had to manually write lines of code to do that. Do you need to have any coding skills to vibe code? You actually don't -- you can make simple apps just by vibe coding. But it might not be the best solution depending on what you're trying to build and how many people you want to use it. If you want to bring a vibe-coded app all the way to being a fully launched product that a lot of people can use, you still need coding skill and precision. Sometimes people think "I just need to write two sentences about my app and I'll have an app in the Google Play store that everyone can use!" So it's not just like you can think of something, see it in your mind and poof -- it's vibe coded perfectly, working exactly as you imagined? Right. You can describe something in simple terms and get a vibe-coded app -- but to turn it into a real product you'll need to keep going. It's great to start by opening a vibe coding tool and trying something simple -- for example, the Canvas option in Gemini allows you to enter a prompt like "make me a web app prototype." You'll get a basic product. If you wanted to turn this into something lots of people could use, then you could take the next step and start coding, or sharing your basic web app with a developer who would take it to the next stage. For that step, there are tools like Jules, an AI coding agent from Labs, which connects with your code and adds its own code based on what you've already made -- plus you can ask it to make changes using natural language. Starting this whole process with vibe coding means more of what you saw in your mind's eye can make it into the final product. Your vision and your vibe! Sounds like vibe coding isn't mindless, but it's helpful for someone who wants to make something and doesn't know how to code. What kinds of projects do you think are a good fit for vibe coding? It can help you with prototyping and visualizing your idea so you can communicate it to others, for example if you want to make a functioning app or website for a lot of people to use. Tools like Stitch are especially good at this -- you can generate an interface and get front-end code, and then pair it with an AI coding agent like Jules to turn that design into working code. Jules is more of a developer tool to implement ideas at a production level. It's really helpful because you can hand off multiple tasks at once -- something our users love! -- like fixing bugs or building out new features. Together, Stitch and Jules show how vibe coding isn't only about generating snapshots of an experience, but about making the full loop from idea to design to production-ready code accessible. I'm guessing what I could vibe code would be very different from what an engineer could vibe code, right? Well, sure, but your purposes are probably different, too. For example, Stitch is great when you want to quickly describe or visualize an idea, while Jules can carry that forward into live prototypes and all the way into production. Used together, they mirror the way an engineer and a designer might collaborate. If you're not an engineer or a designer, vibe coding is a way to visualize what you want an engineer to build. Instead of starting with a doc, start with an interactive visual. Also, vibe coding tools are totally something to just have fun with! You can make whatever you want for yourself or to share with friends for no reason other than your own entertainment. What's your advice for someone who doesn't want to be a traditional engineer and wants to get good enough at vibe coding to either build apps or help others visualize them? Before using a vibe coding tool, start with Gemini and try writing prompts that describe your ideas. Ask Gemini "what am I not considering here?" or "what are some different takes on this?" You're going to get a much better prompt out of it, but also you're going to develop more of a sense of taste, which is really important! Why's that? If you first iterate on the description of what you want to build, you'll start off on way stronger footing for the actual app. And you don't want AI to make all the decisions on its own -- you want to take the lead! What I've found is that when you chat with Gemini about your prompt, the back and forth conversation helps you identify details that you want to include. So much of using these tools is knowing yourself and what you want to accomplish, not just listening to the AI. Any other tips? I'd also suggest playing with some of these tools -- like Canvas or Stitch. Have very low expectations for yourself! Don't be intimidated by vibe coding. Many of our products in Labs began as fast, vibe-coded experiments and then grew into stable, production-ready tools. Stitch and Jules allow you to quickly experiment as well: They capture the playful energy of vibe coding while also delivering the depth and reliability developers need to build real applications.

AI is transforming how software engineers do their jobs. Just don't call it 'vibe-coding'

One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some call it "vibe-coding" because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there's no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies to make the best one. "The essence of it is you're no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax," said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code. "You're not looking at every single line of code. You're more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish." Wu added, however, that "vibe-coding" is not a term she uses. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the "world's best" for coding and other complex tasks. Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help to organizing meal plans, but the "top use case" for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh. "That is often the first thing large organizations go after," Walsh said. "I think there's broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they're getting the most traction." And while Walsh said Anthropic's products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub. "This is the most competitive space in the industry right now," said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup's office in Mountain View, California. Windsurf's coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it quickly found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf's founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that another AI coding startup, Cognition, acquired in July. "It's been a really volatile time at Windsurf," Wang told employees in a July email as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies' integration is "going really well," Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a fictional setting in SpongeBob SquarePants. Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the "autocorrect" features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves. Anthropic said its new Claude Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent. Anthropic's first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company's Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it. "Over time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic," Wu said. Anthropic, in a consumer usage report earlier this month, said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more "niche" activities on the platform. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks. Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic's Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with when he coined the phrase "vibe-coding" in February. "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," he wrote on X. It was "getting too good," he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and "barely even touch the keyboard" and use it for throwaway weekend projects. "It's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later. Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise. The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient. Walsh said Gartner's position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it." Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' -- ages 22-25 -- in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve about 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier. It's likely to have grown even higher since then. Karpathy didn't respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said. "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

AI Is Transforming How Software Engineers Do Their Jobs. Just Don't Call It 'Vibe-Coding'

One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some call it "vibe-coding" because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there's no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies to make the best one. "The essence of it is you're no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax," said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code. "You're not looking at every single line of code. You're more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish." Wu added, however, that "vibe-coding" is not a term she uses. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the "world's best" for coding and other complex tasks. Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help to organizing meal plans, but the "top use case" for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh. "That is often the first thing large organizations go after," Walsh said. "I think there's broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they're getting the most traction." And while Walsh said Anthropic's products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub. "This is the most competitive space in the industry right now," said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup's office in Mountain View, California. Windsurf's coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it quickly found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf's founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that another AI coding startup, Cognition, acquired in July. "It's been a really volatile time at Windsurf," Wang told employees in a July email as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies' integration is "going really well," Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a fictional setting in SpongeBob SquarePants. Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the "autocorrect" features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves. Anthropic said its new Claude Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent. Anthropic's first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company's Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it. "Over time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic," Wu said. Anthropic, in a consumer usage report earlier this month, said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more "niche" activities on the platform. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks. Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic's Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with when he coined the phrase "vibe-coding" in February. "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," he wrote on X. It was "getting too good," he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and "barely even touch the keyboard" and use it for throwaway weekend projects. "It's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later. Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise. The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient. Walsh said Gartner's position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it." Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' -- ages 22-25 -- in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve about 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier. It's likely to have grown even higher since then. Karpathy didn't respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said. "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

Vibe Planning : The Smarter Way to Code with AI Agents

What if coding wasn't just about writing lines of code, but about orchestrating a seamless partnership between human creativity and artificial intelligence? Imagine a development process where AI agents don't just follow orders but actively collaborate with you, brainstorming ideas, refining plans, and catching errors before they snowball into costly setbacks. This is the promise of Vibe Planning, a innovative approach that redefines how developers interact with AI. Gone are the days of treating AI as mere tools; now, they can be your strategic allies, helping you build smarter, faster, and with greater precision. In an era where traditional workflows often feel rigid and error-prone, Vibe Planning offers a refreshing alternative that's as dynamic as the challenges it seeks to solve. In this piece, Prompt Engineering uncover how Vibe Planning transforms coding into a collaborative and iterative experience. From breaking down complex projects into manageable tasks to using tools like Tracer for real-time insights, this methodology equips you with the strategies to optimize your workflow and elevate your results. But it's not just about efficiency, it's about fostering a deeper understanding of the development process and unlocking new levels of innovation. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, the principles of Vibe Planning will challenge the way you think about coding and inspire you to approach your projects with newfound clarity and confidence. After all, what could be more exciting than reshaping how we build the future? Traditional approaches to using coding agents often fail to fully harness their potential. When AI agents are treated solely as tools for executing predefined tasks, the process becomes rigid and prone to inefficiencies. This limited interaction can result in errors and missed opportunities for optimization. Furthermore, relying on agents in this way restricts your ability to deepen your understanding of the development process. Without meaningful collaboration, you risk producing poorly designed solutions that may lead to project delays or outright failure. Vibe Planning addresses these shortcomings by fostering a more dynamic and interactive relationship with AI agents. Vibe Planning is a forward-thinking methodology that emphasizes collaboration between developers and AI agents. Instead of delegating tasks without oversight, you engage in an iterative dialogue with the agent to brainstorm ideas, refine concepts, and align on project objectives. This approach breaks down complex projects into smaller, manageable tasks, making sure clarity and focus at every stage of development. By treating AI agents as collaborators rather than tools, you maintain control over the process while using their capabilities to enhance productivity and accuracy. This method encourages a balanced partnership, where the developer provides strategic direction and oversight, while the AI agent contributes computational power and efficiency. The result is a workflow that is not only more agile but also more conducive to learning and innovation. Here is a selection of other guides from our extensive library of content you may find of interest on vibe coding. The Vibe Planning workflow is designed to optimize efficiency, reduce errors, and foster collaboration. Below is a breakdown of the key steps involved: This structured workflow ensures that your development process remains adaptable and collaborative, allowing you to address challenges proactively while maintaining a clear focus on project goals. To illustrate the practical application of Vibe Planning, consider the development of a web application that integrates Google's Nano Banana image processing model via a REST API. Here's how the process might unfold: By following this methodical, step-by-step approach, you can achieve efficient development while reducing the likelihood of errors and fostering a deeper understanding of the project's intricacies. Adopting Vibe Planning offers numerous advantages that can significantly enhance your development process and overall skill set. These benefits include: This approach not only improves project results but also enables you to take an active role in the development process, making sure that your skills and expertise continue to evolve. Tracer plays a pivotal role in the Vibe Planning workflow, offering features that simplify planning, task breakdown, and verification. Here's how Tracer can enhance your development process: By incorporating Tracer into your workflow, you can manage projects more effectively, achieve better results, and maintain a clear focus on your objectives. Vibe Planning represents a fantastic approach to software development, emphasizing collaboration, adaptability, and precision. By treating AI agents as partners and using tools like Tracer, you can streamline your workflow, enhance your learning, and deliver high-quality projects. Whether you're integrating advanced models like Google's Nano Banana or tackling simpler development tasks, this methodology ensures that you remain in control of the process while achieving superior outcomes.

AI is transforming how software engineers do their jobs. Just don't call it 'vibe-coding'

One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some call it "vibe-coding" because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there's no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies to make the best one. "The essence of it is you're no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax," said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code. "You're not looking at every single line of code. You're more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish." Wu added, however, that "vibe-coding" is not a term she uses. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the "world's best" for coding and other complex tasks. Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help to organizing meal plans, but the "top use case" for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh. "That is often the first thing large organizations go after," Walsh said. "I think there's broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they're getting the most traction." And while Walsh said Anthropic's products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub. "This is the most competitive space in the industry right now," said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup's office in Mountain View, California. Windsurf's coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf's founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that Cognition acquired in July. "It's been a really volatile time at Windsurf," Wang wrote to employees in July as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies' integration is "going really well," Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a setting in SpongeBob SquarePants. Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the "autocorrect" features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves. Anthropic said its new Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent. Anthropic's first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company's Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it. "Over time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic," Wu said. Anthropic has said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more "niche" activities. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks. Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic's Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. It was Cursor's Composer, combined with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase "vibe-coding" in February. "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," he wrote on X. It was "getting too good," he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and "barely even touch the keyboard." "It's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works." Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later. Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise. The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient. Walsh said Gartner's position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it." Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' -- ages 22-25 -- in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier. Karpathy didn't respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said. "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."