Artificial intelligence has a lot of promise, and nowhere is that more evident than in the world of programming. There are various AI tools out there that can, to one degree or another, write code based on the instructions of the user.

This has allowed regular people with no programming experience to create some surprisingly good apps. This type of coding has come to be known as ‘vibe coding’ because the person doing it just types in, or even just speaks, what they want, and the AI tools generate the code.

A number of high-profile executives have come out to confirm that they use this to try out various ideas they have before they bring them to their developer teams to build out robust apps.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski is the CEO of Klarna, a buy-now-pay-later platform that has been growing rapidly. He recently told the podcast Sourcery that he has been engaged in vibe coding. He explained:

“Rather than disturbing my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I test it myself. Look, I’ve actually made this work, this is how it works, what do you think, could we do it this way?’”

Of course, there is no way to know what his team of actual developers thinks about this. It would surprise nobody to know that they hate it when non-programmers come to them with crazy ideas and half-baked code, expecting them to make it a reality overnight.

In addition, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, has confirmed that he too ‘messes around’ with vibe coding. He has apparently created an app that would bring information from multiple different sources that he likes together into one dashboard.

While all of this sounds great on the surface, many people wonder just how effective this type of coding really is. A report found from Fastly, a content delivery program, that 95% of the 800 developers that were asked reported that they have to spend extra time fixing AI-generated code.

Would it actually be faster to just have developers coding from scratch like they have been doing for years? That is not yet known.

Whatever the case, it seems unlikely that vibe coding or AI-powered developers are going to go away anytime soon. The cat is out of the bag on this, and at least for the foreseeable future, that is not going to change.

Of course, the more these types of systems are used, the better they will become. In theory, the added time that developers have to spend today to fix up this code is just part of the training for AI systems to improve and eventually replace the developers entirely.

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