Andrew Ng says vibe coding is a bad name for a real and exhausting job

Summary

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. Related stories Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know 'Everyone should learn to code'Ng a...