The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

These coders want AI to take their jobs

Vibe coding and what it means for the future of programming, explained.

Just over a year ago, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In a post on X, he wrote that it’s where “you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

Since then, coders from all backgrounds — and folks with zero experience — have tapped into their vibes to make apps and websites. Vibe coding platforms, powered by AI models like Claude, Codex, and Gemini, have gained traction as a way to give normies a toolset to code whatever they want, without writing a single line of script.

Tech behemoths like Amazon and bustling Silicon Valley startups even have their coders using it. It’s doing the grunt work for now, but they say it’s opening up a whole new world of possibilities. One possibility: It takes their job. But it’s a trade-off that some of them are willing to make.

Clive Thompson wrote a book about this and spent time with over 70 vibe coders to understand how the technology is upending the industry and if this is the end of computer programming as we know it. On Today, Explained, co-host Sean Rameswaram dug into these questions and even vibe coded a simple website while doing it.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You spent a lot of time hanging out with coders who were vibe coding. And from what I could tell from reading your piece in the New York Times Magazine is that they’re not vibe coding the same way that I was vibe coding.

No, they’re doing something that’s a lot more aggressive and ambitious. What they’re doing is they are using multiple agents, kind of swarms of agents at the same time. If they’re using Claude Code or Codex or Gemini they will have it wired into their laptops. Those agents can create files, destroy files. They can take code that’s been written, they can push it live into production in........

© Vox