Vibe Coding Could Change Everything
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What is vibe coding and how does it work?
Do you guys want to start out by introducing yourselves? Oh, why don't you go first, Joanna?
I am Joanna Stern. I am the Senior Personal Technology Columnist at The Wall Street Journal.
I am Ben Cohen. I am the Science of Success Columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
Ben and Joanna aren't just colleagues. They're also friends who frequently text back and forth.
Well, I often send Joanna annoying text messages about technology, and I started bothering her with texts about Claude Code, asking if she had played around with it and also asking, like, when are you going to write about it?
Claude Code is a coding tool made by the AI company Anthropic. The tool allows users to create websites, apps, or anything that requires coding just by typing your vision into a chat box. It's a process known as vibe coding.
It's coding with your vibes, right? You don't know how to code. You type it into your chat bot, describe the thing you want, and create the thing.
Late last year, Cloud Code received a major update. And it worked so well, it started blowing people's minds in the tech world. And a few weeks ago, Ben started playing with it and texting Joanna about the stuff he was making.
His first one was he was bragging about his new personal website that he made with Claude Code.
And he was like, hey, senior tech columnist, look at this website that I made. Aren't you proud of me?
And I think my text back was like, that's really awesome. Welcome to 1995, Ben. Like, that's super cool.
It looked old and crappy.
No, actually, it looks really good. Everyone should go visit bzcohen.com. Is that right?
Absolutely. Ben and Joanna have both been spending a lot of time with ClaudeCode. And they say it's a development that could have big implications for jobs across many different industries.
It makes vibe coding even simpler for people who don't know anything about code, but also do know everything about code. I mean, that's the amazing thing about this product is that People who have spent their lives as software developers and have risen to the top of their field as coders are now increasingly using cloud code for their code, in addition to people who don't know a lick of code like Joanna and me.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, February 4th. Coming up on the show, why everyone is freaking out about cloud code.
So I've been reading a lot about cloud code and I've been seeing a lot of people who follow AI saying that this could be the biggest thing to happen in AI since chat GPT. Why are people making that comparison?
Well, I think since we've had the chat GPT moment, we've seen all of this progression in models. And so I think all these big leaps we've had with AI products, whether it be image generators or video generators, these have all been like small unlocks to things that computers can do for us, right? We're like, wow, holy crap, it made that image. And it looks so much better than the image it made last year, right? And I think that is what this Claude Code moment was for coding and vibe coding was, wow, this is getting so good that people that are in the tech world are using this fully to write their code.
All right, tell me the story of how Cloud Code was created.
Okay, so the origin story of Cloud Code goes back to September 2024, like the ancient days of AI, like 18 months ago, with Boris Cherny, who is the father of Cloud Code. He began tinkering with this coding tool as a side project one day not long after he started at Anthropic.
Czerny was just an engineer at Anthropic, among the company's rank and file. He created Cloud Code as a tool to help him with his own job. It only took him a couple days to build. And when he shared it internally, in a company-wide Slack message, he had no idea how big of a deal it would become. It was celebrated with two raised hands emojis in the company-wide Slack. But as his colleagues started using it, it became pretty clear it had a lot of potential.
What he found interesting was that whenever he looked at the screens of like data scientists within Anthropic, so not like software developers or coders, they were using cloud code, even when it wasn't actually all that easy to use, like a primitive, clunky version of cloud code.
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