Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, is doing something unexpected for one of the biggest names in tech: casually building web apps with AI coding assistants.
“I wish I could do more,” Pichai said on Wednesday at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco.
“I’ve just been messing around — either with Cursor or I vibe coded with Replit — trying to build a custom webpage with all the sources of information I wanted in one place. I could type a location and get it all,” Pichai said.
The web app is “partially complete,” he added.
“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.
Tech giants like Amazon are also embracing vibe coding for workers’ productivity. Business Insider’s Eugene Kim reported on Wednesday that Amazon is in talks to adopt the AI coding tool Cursor for its employees.
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.
“It’s exciting to see how casually you can do it now,” Pichai said. “Compared to the early days of coding, things have come a long way.”
“It feels so delightful to be a coder in this moment,” he added.
A Google spokesperson declined further comment.
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Software engineers in the AI era
Asked whether software engineers are still needed in the age of AI coding tools, Pichai said, “I think so, yes.”
The sentiment echoes a growing consensus among some tech leaders: AI may supercharge developers, but it won’t replace them. Instead, it’s shifting what the job looks like — from boilerplate coding to a more fluid and creative collaboration between human and machine.
Windsurf’s CEO, Varun Mohan, said on a recent podcast that if AI can take over repetitive tasks like boilerplate coding, developers will be freed up to focus on what really matters — testing bold ideas.
Mohan said engineering is starting to look more like a research-driven culture, one in which developers test hypotheses, evaluate them, and get user feedback. Those are steps that make a product significantly better, he said.
Startups should never be hiring engineers to “quickly write boilerplate code,” he added.
Other tech CEOs are issuing warnings about the future of the engineering profession. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said that demand for software engineers could eventually dip.
“My basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers,” he said in March, referring to OpenAI’s hiring strategy.
He also predicted that AI-driven job displacement won’t happen all at once but will accelerate over time.
“It kind of just seeps through the economy and mostly kind of like eats things little by little and then faster and faster,” Altman said.