Vibe coding might sound chill, but Andrew Ng thinks the name is unfortunate.
The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said the term misleads people into imagining engineers just “go with the vibes” when using AI tools to write code.
“It’s unfortunate that that’s called vibe coding,” Ng said at a firechat chat in May at conference LangChain Interrupt. “It’s misleading a lot of people into thinking, just go with the vibes, you know — accept this, reject that.”
In reality, coding with AI is “a deeply intellectual exercise,” he said. “When I’m coding for a day with AI coding assistance, I’m frankly exhausted by the end of the day.”
Despite his gripe with the name, Ng is bullish on AI-assisted coding. He said it’s “fantastic” that developers can now write software faster with these tools, sometimes while “barely looking at the code.”
“Vibe coding,” coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, describes giving AI prompts to write code. As Karpathy puts it, developers can “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.”
The rise of vibe coding has shaken the way people think about software development. It has left some engineers wondering if AI could put them out of a job and sparked debate among investors over whether technical skills are still a must-have for startup founders.
It’s also helping nontechnical people build apps. A Block product designer with no formal engineering training told BI she built a dog ID app in two months through vibe coding.
More businesses should embrace AI-assisted coding, Ng said.
“It’s been interesting to see how many companies — CIOs and CTOs — still have policies that don’t let engineers use AI-assisted coding,” he said. “We have to get past that.”
“My teams and I just hate to ever have to code again without AI assistance,” he added.
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‘Everyone should learn to code’
Ng also said he is tired of the belief that AI will make coding obsolete.
“Over the last year, a few people have been advising others to not learn to code on the basis that AI will automate coding,” he said. “I think we’ll look back at some of the worst career advice ever given.”
Instead, “everyone should learn to code” — at least one programming language, Ng said.
“One of the most important skills of the future for developers and non-developers is the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want so it will do it for you,” he said.
Understanding how computers work — including how to spot and interpret errors — helps people write more precise prompts and instructions, he added.
At his startup AI Fund, Ng said everyone knows how to code, including the chief financial officer, the general counsel, and even the receptionist.
“It’s not that I want them to be software engineers. They’re not,” he said. “But in their respective job functions, by learning a little bit about how to code, they’re better able to tell a computer what they want it to do.”
That clarity, Ng said, is “driving meaningful productivity improvements” across the company.
Ng did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.