Latest news with #Replit
Business Insider
9 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Big Tech is vibe coding with these winning AI startups
It's getting clearer who the winners will be in key parts of the generative AI race, according to Elad Gil, a top startup investor. "In coding, it seems like it's consolidated into 2 or 3 players," he said recently on my favorite AI podcast, " No Priors." He highlighted Cursor, Codium (now called Qodo), Cognition AI (the startup behind Devin), and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. A clear sign of progress in the tech industry is when a giant platform decides to use an outside service rather than its own product. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have thousands of engineers who can whip up new tech pretty well. So it's a major signal when these companies decide that, no, their home-grown stuff may not be enough. This is happening with Cursor, an AI coding tool from startup Anysphere. Amazon is working on making this available to its employees, according to a scoop this week from Business Insider's Eugene Kim. Amazon already has its own AI coding assistant, Q, and is developing a more advanced tool codenamed " Kiro." So this is a notable move for a company that had warned employees about using third-party AI tools. Google has its own internal AI coding tools, too. And yet, CEO Sundar Pichai said this week he's been messing around with Cursor and a similar service called Replit, building a custom webpage for himself. Software engineering is evolving from a specialized skill into something that non-technical folks can try. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likes to say that everyone is a programmer now. Instead of learning complex coding languages, we can create digital things using plain English. Still, some AI coding tools require more expertise than others. Cursor is an IDE, or integrated developer environment, a common setup for pro software engineers. Replit and another coding tool called work in a browser and are considered more user-friendly for novices. Pichai made the distinction this week, saying he uses Cursor, and has "vibe coded with Replit." Vibe coding is a hot new phrase for some of these easier-to-use tools. A good rule of thumb: If you didn't know what IDE stands for, you probably aren't ready for Cursor! Here are more tips.
Fast Company
14 hours ago
- Fast Company
Why vibecoding your own apps is so amazing—and exasperating
'The truth is, I cannot explain exactly where your 1,216 image files went or when they disappeared. I apologize for not being more careful about investigating the root cause before taking any action. The bottom line is that your image files are missing, and I cannot restore them.' I don't hold hard drives personally accountable for crashing, or blame vending machines for eating my money. But when the AI-coding service Replit accidentally blew away more than a thousand photographs my grandmother took, my blood boiled. After all, the web-based tool and I had spent an enormous amount of time in recent months talking about the software we were creating together. I'd explain what I envisioned an app doing; it would do all the programming—a process known as vibecoding. When I noticed the photos were gone, I told Replit it could never act so cavalierly again, prompting the abject apology above. Replit's gaffe—made by a feature called the Agent—was an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. I had copies of the images and could easily re-upload them. Still, the fact that it didn't occur to the AI to check in with me before the mass deletion was a sobering reminder that I couldn't trust it. Which is a strange way to feel about a service that's easily my favorite tech product of 2025. The first major project I undertook with Replit—which I wrote about in an April newsletter —was creating the note-taking app of my dreams. It remains slightly buggy, but has already changed my life for the better. The second one may end up meaning even more to me. In the 1960s and '70s, my grandmother traveled the planet, shooting hundreds of pictures along the way. A few years ago, I boxed up her trays of slides and mailed them to a company that scanned them into digital form. They'd been sitting in my Dropbox account ever since—disorganized, largely unidentified, a little overwhelming. When I read about how people were using ChatGPT to identify the locations where photos were taken, it dawned on me that AI might be able to tell whether Grandmother Jacobson snapped a particular shot in Italy, Beijing, or Morocco. A little experimentation proved it could—not always, but often enough to be of huge help in making sense of her globe-trotting adventures. I started crafting a location-detecting app in Replit. After fiddling with the OpenAI API in Replit, I ended up using Anthropic's Claude API instead, since it seemed to process images more swiftly and at least as accurately. Even as a work in progress, the app I'm building feels magical. That photo with a windmill turning inconspicuously in the distance? No, it isn't Holland—it's Israel, which (I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know) has an iconic 168-year-old windmill of its own. Claude has correctly identified many photos based on architecture, statuary, and even landscape, and when it can't pinpoint a location, it often makes intelligent guesses about the country or city in question. Suddenly, I have a much better sense of where my grandmother went and what she saw, 50 to 60 years after the fact. But as with all things AI, magic only gets you so far when you're trying to accomplish practical tasks. Much of the time, I feel less like a wizard and more like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, awash in problems created by my reliance on a tool I don't truly understand. A few lessons I've learned: It's not like partnering with a human software engineer. At all. In the case of my note-taking app, Replit and I have been working together for months. Every line of code, it wrote. Yet when I ask for changes, it always feels like the service has just seen the app for the first time and is reverse-engineering how it works. When debugging its own work, it's also prone to making the same mistakes over and over, as if it never quite realizes its fixes aren't helping. The absence of accumulated knowledge is striking. Security might be a crapshoot. When I asked Replit to set up a login system for my notes app, it set a default password of—drum roll—'password123.' Then it put a helpful reminder hint on the home screen: 'The password is password123.' D'oh! I started over and gave it painstaking instructions on creating a two-factor authentication system. It seems solid. But as with Replit bulk-erasing my grandmother's photos, its unsupervised first stab at security is proof that AI is capable of making the stupidest imaginable decisions when it comes to data stewardship. The Replit Agent is an overconfident suck-up. I quickly realized that its sometimes exuberant updates on the progress it was making didn't mean the results would be any good. Nor was its nonstop praise for my ideas evidence that I'm a vibecoding savant: Like other LLM-based tools, it's sycophantic to the point of being a grating twerp. Seriously, I'd prefer a zero-personality Replit Agent that just did stuff without yammering about it—even if it no longer apologizes for its missteps. You pay for its errors. I pay $25 monthly for a Replit plan, and burn through the computing credits it provides in short order. Once I do, it charges me 25 cents for each additional change the Agent makes to the code. I've spent hundreds of dollars on my note-taking app so far, and about $40 on the photo-identifying one in its briefer existence. I'd do it all over again, but a sizable percentage of that investment has gone into Replit trying to repair its own buggy code, getting stuck, and going in circles. Counterintuitively, the worse the quality of its work, the more it costs. To reiterate: I love the apps I've put together in Replit. Since I started using the service in late March, it's added handy new features at a clip that's brisk even by AI-company standards. Already, I can't imagine not vibecoding. I just hope that the day isn't too far off when its pleasures aren't accompanied by a fair amount of pain.
Entrepreneur
a day ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Google CEO Sundar Pichai Is 'Vibe Coding' a Website for Fun
Vibe coding is the process of prompting AI to write code, instead of doing it manually. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai disclosed that he has been "vibe coding," or using AI to code for him through prompts, to build a webpage. Pichai said on Wednesday at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco that he had been experimenting with AI coding assistants Cursor and Replit, both of which are advertised as able to create code from text prompts, to build a new webpage. Related: Here's How Much a Typical Google Employee Makes in a Year "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," Pichai said, per Business Insider. Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Pichai said that he had "partially" completed the webpage, and that coding had "come a long way" from its early days. Vibe coding is a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. In a post on X in February, Karpathy described how AI tools are getting good enough that software developers can "forget that the code even exists." Instead, they can ask for AI to code on their behalf and create a project or web app without writing a line of code themselves. There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper… — Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 2, 2025 The rise of vibe coding has led AI coding assistants to explode in popularity. One AI coding tool, Cursor, became the fastest-growing software app to reach $100 million in annual revenue in January. Almost all of Cursor's revenue comes from 360,000 individual subscribers, not big enterprises. However, that balance could change: As of earlier this week, Amazon is reportedly in talks to adopt Cursor for its employees. Another coding tool, Replit, says it has enabled users to make more than two million apps in six months. The company has 34 million global users as of November. Related: This AI Startup Spent $0 on Marketing. Its Revenue Just Hit $200 Million. Noncoders are using vibe coding to bring their ideas to life. Lenard Flören, a 28-year-old art director with no prior coding experience, told NBC News last month that he used AI tools to vibe code a personalized workout tracking app. Harvard University neuroscience student, Rishab Jain, 20, told the outlet that he used Replit to vibe code an app that translates ancient texts into English. Instead of downloading someone else's app and paying a subscription fee, "now you can just make it," Jain said. Popular vibe coding tools offer a free entry point into vibe coding, as well as subscription plans. Replit has a free tier, a $20 a month core level with expanded capabilities, such as unlimited private and public apps, and a $35 per user, per month teams subscription. Cursor also has a free tier, a $20 per month pro level, and a $40 per user, per month, business subscription. Despite the existence of vibe coding, Pichai still thinks that human software engineers are necessary. At Bloomberg Tech on Wednesday, Pichai said that Google will keep hiring human engineers and growing its engineering workforce "even into next year" because a bigger workforce "allows us to do more." "I just view this [AI] as making engineers dramatically more productive," he said. Alphabet is the fifth most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $2 trillion.
India Today
a day ago
- India Today
What is Vibe Coding and why are IT professionals talking about it all the time? The new tech trend explained
For a long time, writing code meant sitting for hours in front of a computer, typing out lines and lines of instructions in a programming language. It needed technical skills, a lot of patience, and even more practice. But recently, a new way of writing code has become popular — and people are calling it vibe coding. It sounds like a trend on social media, but it's actually about using AI to build software just by describing what you want in plain, simple language. No need for complex code, no stress — just a simple conversation with your computer that turns into an app, game, or website. Let's break it down exactly is vibe coding?If we have to define vibe coding, you can think of it as a way of creating software without writing all the code yourself. Instead, you just talk to an AI tool — by typing or even speaking — and explain what you want to build. The AI does the heavy lifting and writes the code for don't have to worry about the way code has to be written, or remembering commands, or finding bugs. You just describe your idea clearly, and the AI takes care of the rest. That's why it's called vibe coding — because you're going with the flow and trusting the AI to figure out the did this idea come from? The term vibe coding was made popular by Andrej Karpathy, who has worked with companies like Tesla and OpenAI. He described it as letting go of the old-school way of thinking about code and just focusing on your idea. You don't have to be a pro coder any more. You just need to have a clear picture of what you want, and AI tools will help you turn it into himself said he doesn't even check the code line by line any more — he just describes what he wants, accepts whatever the AI suggests, and moves on. It might sound lazy, but for quick projects or experiments, it works surprisingly does vibe coding actually work?Here's a simple step-by-step example of how someone might vibe code:Pick from the many tools available, like Replit, Cursor, or ChatGPT that can generate you need to type your idea. You might say something like, 'I want to create a calculator app with buttons for plus, minus, multiply, and divide.'After this, the AI will write the code for you. The tool will create the base version of your you need to test and tweak accordingly. If something doesn't work or looks odd, you just tell the AI what to the end, you have a working app that you created without doing any actual traditional coding is being used by both developers and non-developers. People who never wrote a line of code in their life are now able to build apps and vibe coding the same as AI-assisted coding?Not quite. AI-assisted coding still involves a developer writing most of the code, with the AI giving suggestions or helping fix mistakes. Vibe coding, on the other hand, is when the AI takes the lead, and the person mostly just gives we be worried about vibe coding?advertisementSome people in the tech industry are worried that vibe coding might make programmers lazy, or that it could lead to poorly written code, especially if people don't review what the AI creates. There's also concern that beginners might never learn the basics of real others believe it's just a new chapter in how we build software. It doesn't replace serious programming, especially for complex systems — but it does make building simple apps faster and more fun.
India Today
2 days ago
- Business
- India Today
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now vibe coding and he is impressed
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has offered a rare peek into his off-duty tech habits, and it turns out, he's spending his free time 'vibe coding' using the AI-powered development platform Replit. In a recent interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Pichai spoke at length about how artificial intelligence is transforming the internet, user experiences, and the world of web development. But what caught the attention of developers and tech enthusiasts was a personal revelation: 'I was vibe coding with Replit a few weeks ago,' he said. 'I mean the power of what you're going to be able to create on the web – we haven't given that power to developers in 25 years.'advertisementThe moment went viral after Replit CEO Amjad Masad shared a snippet from the interview on LinkedIn, writing, 'Google's CEO vibe codes with Replit in his spare time. What's your excuse?' Pichai's endorsement of AI-assisted programming comes at a time when major players in the tech industry are betting big on AI coding tools. According to recent reports, companies like Google and Microsoft already rely on AI to write about 30 per cent of their code. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that almost all coding could be done by AI within the next 12 to 18 months. In the interview, Pichai compared the rise of AI to earlier platform shifts, such as the advent of the internet or mobile devices. 'Just imagine, you know, when the internet came, blogging became a thing With mobile came cameras and you could shoot and create videos. You know, look at what's happened with YouTube,' he called AI a 'bigger' shift than the internet and showed optimism about the future: 'I think it's an exciting time to be a consumer, it's an exciting time to be a developer. I'm looking forward to it.'So, what is 'vibe coding'?Vibe coding is a new style of programming where developers use AI assistants – like Replit, Cursor, or OpenAI's Code Interpreter – to help them write code more intuitively. Instead of focusing on syntax and technical structure, developers can describe what they want in natural language, and the AI helps bring it to life. It's like brainstorming with a very smart coding approach is ideal for beginners who want to explore coding without being overwhelmed, and it's also a productivity booster for seasoned developers. The AI handles repetitive tasks, suggests improvements, and helps with debugging – making coding feel more creative and hype around vibe coding is reflected in investor interest too. In May, The Financial Times reported that Cursor, built by startup Anysphere, had raised $900 million in new funding, reaching a $9 billion valuation. That's a massive leap from the $100 million raised just months earlier. The sharp increase shows how confident investors are in the future of AI coding. Meanwhile, OpenAI is also moving fast in this space. The company recently confirmed its plan to acquire Windsurf, another AI coding platform, for $3 billion.
