Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroff. This is The Daily. On Monday, we looked at the growing pushback against sprawling AI data centers in communities across America. Today, my colleague Kevin Roos takes us inside one of the most transformative technologies that infrastructure is enabling.
A new way of programming that may be the biggest development in artificial intelligence since the launch of ChatGPT. It's Wednesday, February 18th. Okay, so the other day I slacked you, Kevin Roos, my colleague, my friend, the host of the New York Times tech podcast, Hard Fork. And I asked you, what is vibe coding? Because this is a thing I had been hearing about and I had no idea what it was.
And you answered me roughly in the tone that one might use with their very elderly grandmother, I think. Fair to say? Yeah.
Well, I am not ageist. I think people have lots of different levels of comfort with technology. I think my tone of voice was directed at you specifically, Natalie, because I know that you are younger than me. And so you have no excuse to be this confused by technology.
Yeah, okay, fair enough. So since then, I did my own research as any young person would do, and I've come to the understanding that vibe coding is, in fact, very important. It appears to be using AI in a way that is truly revolutionary, and I do think that that I cannot possibly be the only one who has not caught up to this.
And so I want to ask you to just start by laying out the basics for those of us who aren't there yet. What is vibe coding?
So vibe coding is a term that was coined about a year ago by a guy named Andre Karpathy, who's a former programmer at OpenAI, very well known out here in Silicon Valley. And he was describing this thing
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Chapter 2: What is vibe coding and how does it work?
Cloud code sort of blew up. Millions of people have been using it. They are doing increasingly complex tasks with them. People are using these in their jobs in the software industry. And what's really changed is that if you talk to people at the big AI companies who used to program, who used to write code by hand, they'll say, I don't write any code anymore.
I basically supervise this team of agents and I kind of orchestrate them and set them off toward tasks. And then I go get lunch and I come back and the work is done.
Okay, I want to understand this. I want to understand the story of this. I think we should pick one, and it sounds like Claude Code has been the one that's been blowing up. So tell me the story of this model. How did it start? How did it get created?
So this... app, Claude Code, started as a side project. Basically, an engineer at Anthropic named Boris Cherny had an idea. He was trying to sort of get a sense of what Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, could do. So he said, well, what if I just give it my computer?
What if I install Claude inside the terminal app, which is the app that you use to write code and interface with your computer if you're a programmer? And what would happen if I just set Claude loose inside my computer with a bunch of tools, like give it the ability to write scripts, to create files, to organize things, to debug code.
And he starts seeing something really interesting happening around the office. His colleagues are starting to use this tool to do their jobs. They're starting to program with it. It started with the engineers. They're saying this is really great for coding. At first, it's maybe 20 percent of their engineers and then it's 40 percent. And now all of them are using it.
But it's also being used by people who are not professional programmers. People in marketing and sales and finance are using this not to just build little apps, but to automate parts of their jobs.
So it's like really catching on way beyond, you know, the technical people like normies are using it.
Exactly. What people have discovered is that it can do lots of stuff. It can automate your email. It can create dashboards for things. It can reorganize the files on your computer. It's sort of like you just have a computer that can use a computer now.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between vibe coding and agentic coding?
It can help you write your emails or memos or things like that. But it doesn't sort of shock you anymore. This feels different to me and I think to a lot of other people when you can actually build something useful without knowing how to write code.
And I think this is what people think is the thing that's going to take AI from just kind of being a fancier Google to something that genuinely changes how people work.
When you say that this is something that the tech companies have been saying is coming for a long time, what is the it that is coming? What makes it special? Is it just the complexity of the stuff it can do or is it the utility of it?
I think it's the utility, but it's also the economic value. This kind of agentic system can actually do work. It can do tasks. It can perform things that humans would have had to do by hand.
So it is sort of a step in the direction of making these things actually kind of members of the workforce in some sense, where you could have a company with some human employees and then a whole bunch of AI agents doing tasks.
OK, let's talk about that, because obviously when we're talking about economic value, what that presumably means for the people that run these companies is lowering labor costs by potentially eliminating jobs.
Yeah, so that's the big question is, will this just help people at work? Will this kind of agentic coding tool make people faster and more efficient and more productive and give them a new powerful tool in their toolkit? Or will it start to replace people? We are starting to see in the data some signs that this kind of tool is maybe displacing young software developers.
So there was a study from Stanford recently that looked at payroll records and found that employment for young software engineers was just people who are early in their careers, has dropped about 20% from its peak in 2022. So companies that used to hire five or 10 people to write code for them may only need one or two now with a bunch of AI tools.
Can I ask, we were pointing to issues with my beautiful website. How good is this stuff? I mean, can it debug itself? Because I guess I'm seeing that there is also a lot of doubt and skepticism that you can really do this only with an AI tool at this point.
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Chapter 4: How are AI tools transforming the software development landscape?
Is that scary to you? Because it gives me the vibe of a sci-fi reality.
Yeah, this is a sort of scenario that we've heard about in science fiction for years, where you have AIs that are becoming increasingly capable. They're building better and better AIs.
Within the AI community, there's this idea, this phrase of the intelligence explosion, which is when you have these systems that are doing what's known as recursive self-improvement, building better and better versions of themselves.
And so that is one possibility that these systems just start to accelerate their improvements to the point where they are sort of doing all of this autonomously without human involvement. Now, there are some people who think this is still a far-fetched scenario, but just look at the trajectory. I mean, a year ago, You had these very clunky AI vibe coding tools.
Now they're running autonomously for sometimes hours at a time. They can build and maintain real software, and they're starting to help build the next versions of themselves. So I think we are right to be paying attention to this, and I think it's irresponsible to sugarcoat what's happening.
I have to say for the companies and for the people that have been involved in AI, this also has to really be a kind of proof of concept moment for them because there has been so much skepticism about AI over the last year, a lot of fear about frothiness in the market, about whether we're in a bubble, about whether AI is really gonna live up to its potential.
And what you've described is a transformative tool that can be incredibly useful And with that, the potential for real job loss. So any way you slice it, this is AI doing what they said it probably would.
Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, I don't blame people for questioning last year whether we were in an AI bubble. I think most people up to that point had only used things like ChatGPT, which are, you know, very capable on their own.
But I can understand why people would look at that and then look at the billions of dollars being spent on data centers and infrastructure and think like, okay, isn't this a little bit much? But the bet that these AI companies were making is that you could actually turn this stuff into useful tools that would be able to do real valuable work in the economy.
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Chapter 5: What impact does agentic coding have on job markets?
Yeah, there's something deeply unsettling about all of that.
Yeah, I agree. And I myself feel very uncertain about this. And I think there are a lot of people in the tech industry who are very excited about these tools because it's letting them, you know, build a bunch of stuff very quickly. But as I'm hearing from more people in white-collar knowledge work fields... They're just very anxious right now. People are really uncertain.
They don't know if the skills they're building are obsolete. College students don't know what they should be studying so they can get a job after they graduate. People are really getting nervous about how quickly this technology is improving and the possibility that it could make the future look very different.
Okay, and I want to ask about that future. I mean... Are we on a runaway train? The speed with which this is changing feels hard to even capture, honestly. And I wonder if you think about the progress made over one year, what's the next year? What can we expect?
I mean, my honest prediction is that a year from now, these agentic tools will be dramatically better, right? They'll handle big, complex problems. You won't have to hold their hand as much. They will become full-fledged members of the workforce. And a lot of companies will still do things the old way because institutions are very slow to change, as we know.
But there will be this sort of new kind of company that is emerging with AI work at the center of it. And I think that's going to be a really fast-growing part of the economy. I think the job market impacts that we're starting to see hints of today will become much clearer a year from now. But honestly, I lose a lot of visibility myself.
I mean, I have stopped trying to predict more than about six months out because that's about as far as I can see right now. I would not have predicted a year ago when vibe coding first came into my consciousness that it was going to be capable of doing all of this today.
So I think the most we can say right now is these tools are getting better at a very fast and accelerating rate and that they keep doing things that are surprising and useful. And there's a lot of unknowns about what that will mean for the future of human work.
Kevin, one of my favorite humans. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential risks of AI in the workplace?
Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. On tomorrow night and beyond.
Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Ricky Nowetzki, and Olivia Natt, with help from Devin Greenleaf and Mustafa Mirza. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg, Paige Cowett, and Lisa Chow. Contains music by Diane Wong, Dan Powell, and Will Reed, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittroweth. See you tomorrow.
Chapter 7: How is Claude Code changing the way we build software?
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