Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto: Why Claude Code Isn't It & What Comes After the IDE
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What is Vibe Coding and why does Steve Yegge consider it a movement?
We are here live at AI Engineer Summit with Steve Yugi, the legendary Steve Yege of Stevie's Tech Talks, Stevie's platforms brands, and most recently Source Graph and AMP. Welcome. And most recently vibe coding. That's right, the vibe coding book. Uh so this is the big vibe coding discussion. In the pre-chat, we're discussing the intersection of vibe coding and AI engineering. So we got the kind of movement leaders of both sides here. How do you see it?
It's absolutely a movement, right? You got to get people behind it. I mean, there's a it I said at the end of my talk today that there's a huge backlash, and the backlash is only just brewing now. So you and I are pushing forward, right, on these waves of, you know, AI engineering is about is about building AI enabled applications and being being in AI. And vibe coding is about abandoning the old ways of producing software and embracing the new way. And both of these uh area. Making people pretty mad.
I don't th I think they're mad if their identity is tied to the way that they work today with no changes, no room for changes.
Yeah, so I'll start with my first hot take.
Okay. Let's go.
There is a demographic that is the most affected by that. Their identity is the most tied up with the way that they work. Okay. It's not junior engineers. It's not mod engineers. They're all vibe coding. It's senior engineers, senior leaders, uh people who have so basically you can d you can narrow it down to 12 to 15 years of experience. They hate vibe coding and they hate AI and they're online going, My 15 years is better than that AI. Okay.
You you stick with your doing your director stuff and leave the programming to programmers, right? When you have fifteen years of experience like me, then you're qualified to talk, right? Right? So I said something to him, like, I think you need to learn to read a clock. And he's like, and until you have fifteen years of experience and I'm like Well
you got more experience than him.
More I have forty five. So should I like go to sixty before I can talk to you or should I like cut out thirty years of experience so I can be as dumb as you, right? Those are my options. And uh so I don't know. I guess I'll see him in fifteen years. I I so okay, I
think There's one element that I'm trying to figure out of while these people have to coexist, right? And most companies are gonna have a mix. Even open AI, by the way, like we talked about this last night at dinner. Guys, open AI has people who don't use AI to code.
They have people who don't use uh codecs. They probably are using cursor or something. Okay. But they're not using the agentic loops, right? Yeah, yeah. And uh yeah, it's uh so you know, we talked to, you know, uh Andrew Glover there, you know, the director of Dev Prod and uh from what he was saying, they've been planning on going public with this once they have more data about it. Yeah. Anecdotally they're sharing that uh performance. The performance difference is like 10x by any way that you measure it. So lines of code, commits, business impact, whatever. And it's it's so stark and pronounced that the people who aren't adopting it are now 10 times less productive at performance review time. Two people, same title, same job, and all of a sudden one of them is 10 times as productive as the other one.
What do you do and the answer is you panic you actually go to hr and you go to legal and you're like what are our options here because the time is coming okay here's another hot take all right if you're still using an IDE to develop code by January first. You're a bad engineer. Mm-hmm. There's a there's a hot take for you, right? Now you still have uh what five, six weeks to to still be an okay engineer while you're using your IDE, but this is the time that you need to drop it and learn how agents code. Okay, because it's a skill set. I mean, it's so complicated. We wrote this book about it, me and Gene Kim, because we were, you know, we were playing with it ourselves last year and we're blogging about it and talking about it, and every blog post was 30 pages.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Vibe Coding and why does Steve Yegge consider it a movement?
0:03–6:55
2
Why do senior engineers (12‑15 years experience) resist vibe‑coded workflows?
6:55–13:06
3
How many hours of daily use does it take to trust an AI coding agent?
13:06–19:00
4
Why does Steve claim that using an IDE after Jan 1 2025 makes you a bad engineer?
19:00–25:08
5
What is the ‘merge wall’ and how are companies trying to solve it?
25:08–31:18
6
How do multi‑agent orchestration dashboards differ from Cloud Code or Claude Code?
31:18–37:11
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