OpenAI’s cofounder said vibe coding has left human engineers to do quality control.
On an episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast uploaded last week, OpenAI’s cofounder and president, Greg Brockman, said that AI coding will only get better. But until then, it’s taking away some parts of software engineering that he said are enjoyable.
“What we’re going to see is AIs taking more and more of the drudgery, more of this like pain, more of the parts that are not very fun for humans,” Brockman said. He added, “So far, the vibe coding has actually taken a lot of code that is actually quite fun.”
He said that the state of AI coding has left humans to review and deploy code, which is “not fun at all.”
Brockman added that he is “hopeful” for progress in these other areas, to the point that we end up with a “full AI coworker” that could handle delegated tasks.
Changing engineering landscape
Using AI to write code, dubbed “vibe coding” by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, has skyrocketed this year. Engineers and novices alike are using tools like Microsoft’s Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf to write code, develop games, and even build websites from scratch.
Vibe coding has already started changing how much Big Tech and venture capital value people with software engineering expertise.
In March, Y Combinator’s CEO, Gary Tan, said that vibe coding is set to transform the startup landscape. He said that what would’ve once taken “50 or 100” engineers to build can now be accomplished by a team of 10, “when they are fully vibe coders.”
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that AI coding is no longer a nice-to-have skill. Job listings from Visa, Reddit, DoorDash, and a slew of startups showed that the companies explicitly require vibe coding experience or familiarity with AI code generators like Cursor and Bolt.
Still, some in tech circles say leaning on it heavily is short-sighted and the job is being trivialized.
Bob McGrew, the former chief research officer at OpenAI, said that while product managers can make “really cool prototypes” with vibe coding, human engineers will still be brought in to “rewrite it from scratch.”
“If you are given a code base that you don’t understand — this is a classic software engineering question — is that a liability or is it an asset? Right? And the classic answer is that it’s a liability,” McGrew said of software made with vibe coding.
GitHub’s CEO, Thomas Dohmke, said that vibe coding may also slow down experienced coders. On a podcast episode released last week, he said that a worst-case scenario is when a developer is forced to provide feedback in natural language when they already know how to do it in a programming language.
That would be “basically replacing something that I can do in three seconds with something that might potentially take three minutes or even longer,” Dohmke said.
