Advice to Engineers: Upskill or Risk Layoffs

Ever since Andrej Karpathy first tweeted it, “vibe coding” has been on every software developer’s mind. Join Ben Lorica and Steve Yegge to find out what vibe coding means, especially in a professional context. Going beyond the current memes, what will the future of software development look like when we have multiple agents? And how do you prepare for it? Don’t push back against AI now; lean into it.

Points of Interest

• 0:36: Let’s start with CHOP. What do you mean by “chat-oriented programming,” and how does it change the role of a software developer?
• 1:02: Andrej Karpathy has come up with a more accessible packaging: “vibe coding.” Gene Kim and I are going with the flow in our book, which is also about agentic programming.
• 2:02: The industry has the widest distribution of understanding that I’ve ever seen. We’ve got people saying, “You ought to stop using AI”; we’ve got people refusing to use AI; we’ve got people spread out in what they’re using.
• 3:03: Vibe coding started off as “it’s easy.” But people misinterpreted Karpathy’s tweet to mean that the LLM is ready to write all the code. That’s led to production incidents, “no vibe coding,” and a debate over whether you can turn your brain off.
• 3:35: Google decided to adopt vibe coding because you can do it as a grownup, as an engineer. You don’t have to accept whatever AI gives you. If you’re doing a weekend project or a prototype, you don’t have to look carefully at the output. But if you’re doing production coding, you have to demand excellence of your LLM. You have to demand that it produces code to a professional standard. That’s what Google does now.
• 4:38: Vibe coding means using AI. Agents like Claude Code are pretty much the same. 
• 4:58: There’s traditional AI-assisted coding (completions); with vibe coding, the trust in AI is higher. The developer becomes a high-level orchestrator instead of writing code line by line.
• 5:37: Trust is a huge dimension. It’s the number one thing that is keeping the industry from rocketing forward on adoption. With chat programming, even though it’s been eclipsed by agent programming, you get the LLM to do the work—but you have to validate it yourself. You’re nudging it over and over again. Many senior engineers don’t try hard enough. You wouldn’t boot an intern to the curb for failing the first time.
• 7:18: AI doesn’t work right the first time. You can’t trust anything. You have to validate and verify. This is what people have to get over.
• 7:53: You’re still accountable for the code. You own the code. But people are struggling with the new role, which is being a team lead. This is even more true with coding agents like Claude Code. You’re more productive, but you’re not a programmer any more. 
• 8:51: For people to make the transition to vibe coding, what are some of the core skill sets they'll have to embrace?
• 9:07: Prompt engineering is a separate discipline from CHOP or vibe coding. Prompt engineering is static prompting. It’s for embedding AI in an application. Chat programming is dynamic; lots of throwaway prompts that are only used once. 
• 10:13: Engineers should know all the skills of AI. With the AI Engineering book by Chip Huyen, that’s what engineers need to know. Those are the skills you need to put AI in applications, even if you’re not doing product development.
• 11:15: Or put the book into a RAG system. 
• 12:00: Vibe coding is another skill to learn. Learn it; don’t push back on it. Learn how it works, learn how to push it. Claude Code isn’t even an IDE. The form factor is terrible right now. But if you try it and see how powerful agentic coding is, you’ll be shocked. The agent does all the stuff you used to have to tell it to do.
• 13:57: You’ll say, “Here’s a Jira ticket; fix it for me.” First it will find the ticket; it will evaluate your codebase using the same tools you do; then it will come up with an execution plan. It’s nuts what they are doing. We all knew this was coming, but nobody knew it would be here now.