Human engineers stuck doing the boring bits
OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman [pictured] reckons AI-driven software development has turned human coders into overqualified Q&As.
On an episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast, Brockman said AI coding is improving fast but has elbowed humans out of the enjoyable parts of programming.
“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,” he said. “So far, the vibe coding has actually taken a lot of code that is actually quite fun.”
Now engineers are mostly left with reviewing and deploying AI-generated code, which Brockman admitted is “not fun at all.” Still, he is “hopeful” that AI will advance far enough to become a proper digital coworker that can handle delegated tasks without much hand-holding.
OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” to describe this AI-assisted programming. It has surged in popularity this year, as tools like Microsoft’s Copilot, Cursor and Windsurf are being used by everyone from pros to hobbyists to knock out websites, games and full-stack apps with a few prompts.
This shift is already warping how the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street and Big Tech rate engineering talent. In March, Y Combinator chief executive Gary Tan claimed that startups need far fewer engineers.
“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,” he said.
The trend has caught on with corporates too. Business Insider recently found that firms including Visa, Reddit and DoorDash explicitly list vibe coding or experience with AI tools like Cursor and Bolt in their job ads.
Not everyone is sold on the magic though. Former OpenAI research supremo Bob McGrew said vibe coding might make shiny prototypes quickly but proper engineers still need to come in and rewrite everything properly.
“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,” he said.
GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke also had a moan. On another podcast last week, he said vibe coding might slow down veteran developers. Having to describe fixes in natural language instead of just writing the code directly was, according to him, “basically replacing something that I can do in three seconds with something that might potentially take three minutes or even longer.”