Can A.I. Already Do Your Job?

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitrelleff. This is The Daily. On Monday, we looked at the the growing pushback against sprawling AI data centers in communities across America. Today, my colleague Kevin Roos takes us inside one of the most transformative technologies that infrastructure is enabling, A new way of programming that may be the biggest development in artificial intelligence since the launch of ChatGPT. It's Wednesday, February 18. Okay. So the other day, I Slacked you, Kevin Roose, my colleague, my friend, the host of the New York Times tech podcast, Hard Fork. And I asked you, what is vibe coding? Because this is a thing I had been hearing about, and I had no idea what it was. And you answered me roughly in the tone that one might use with their very elderly grandmother, I think. Is it, like, fair to fair to say? Well, I I am not ageist. I I think people have lots of different levels of comfort with technology. I think my tone of voice was directed at you specifically, Natalie, because I know Thank you. Yeah. That you are younger than me, and so you have no excuse Thank you for saying that by the way. Confused by technology. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So since then, I did my own research as any young person would do, and I've come into the understanding that vibe coding is, in fact, very important. It appears to be using AI in a way that is truly revolutionary. And I do think that I cannot possibly be the only one who has not caught up to this. And so I wanna ask you to just start by laying out the basics for those of us who aren't there yet. What is vibe coding? So vibe coding is a term that was coined about a year ago by a guy named Andre Karpathy, who's a former programmer at OpenAI, very well known out here in Silicon Valley. And he was describing this thing that he was doing using these new AI coding tools, which is that instead of learning a programming language and writing the code line by line, by himself, he would just sort of let the program write the code for him and build software that way. Let the vibes do the work. Let the vibes do the work. Exactly. And suddenly, for the first time, about a year ago, you didn't have to know how to code to build software. You could just use these tools. They would help you along the way, and you could just kind of oversee them as they worked. So what does that actually look like? You experimented with it. What did that do for you? Yeah. So I tried vibe coding about a year ago when this term first emerged, and I would build these little test tools for myself. I built an app called Lunchbox Buddy, which was basically a way to help me pack …