OpenAI's former head of research said vibe coding isn't going to make engineering jobs obsolete — for now
AI is not going to replace human software engineers just yet, says OpenAI's former research chief.
Bob McGrew, who left OpenAI last year, said product managers can vibe code "really cool prototypes."
But engineers still have to build the products in case they need to troubleshoot it, he said.
McGrew, who left OpenAI in November, said on the latest episode of Sequoia Capital's "Training Data" podcast that product managers can make "really cool prototypes" with vibe coding. But human engineers will still be brought in to "rewrite it from scratch."
"If you are given a code base that you don't understand — this is a classic software engineering question — is that a liability or is it an asset? Right? And the classic answer is that it's a liability," McGrew said of software made with vibe coding.
"You have to maintain this thing. You don't know how it works, no one knows how it works. That's terrible," he continued.
McGrew said that in the next one or two years, coding will be done by a mix of human engineers working with AI tools like Cursor and AI agents like Devin working in the background.
He added that while the liability that comes with using agents to code has gone down, it is "still, net, a liability."
Human engineers are needed to design and "understand the code base at a high level," McGrew said. This is so that when something goes wrong or if a project "becomes too complicated for AI to understand," a human engineer can help break the problem down into parts for an AI to solve.
McGrew did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The rise of AI has spurred fears of companies replacing their software engineers with AI.
In October, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said on an earnings call that the search giant was using AI to write more than 25% of its new code.
Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Y Combinator, said in March that a quarter of the founders in the startup incubator's 2025 winter batch used AI to code their software.
"For 25% of the Winter 2025 batch, 95% of lines of code are LLM generated. That's not a typo," Tan wrote in an X post.
On Tuesday, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, said in a memo to employees that AI will " reduce our total corporate workforce" and provide "efficiency gains."
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