Latest news with #softwareEngineering
Forbes
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Vibe Coding: It's Four Months Old. What's Up?
Female freelance developer coding and programming. Coding on two with screens with code language and ... More application. What is vibe coding, anyway? The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy a few months ago, is now shorthand for an entire shift in the way that we view software engineering. It's the idea that AI is 'hands-off' in terms of code generation: the machine just takes the human's inputs, and comes up with source code on its own. Although LLMs are not 100% autonomous with this yet, and there's often a need for some debugging, vibe coding essentially asks the programmer to back off and let the AI do its thing. In contemporary coverage of the phenomenon, Forbes Council member Shubham Nigam quotes Rhiannon Williams of the MIT Technology Review: 'Not all AI-assisted coding is vibe coding. To truly vibe-code, you have to be prepared to let the AI fully take control and refrain from checking and directly tweaking the code it generates as you go along—surrendering to the vibes.' So while it's a colloquial term (good vibes, man!) it's also a request for the human in the loop to take distance – not to stand over the LLM's shoulder as it creates. Here's more from a recent panel at Imagination in Action in April. Nikolay Vyahhi of Hyperskill interviews Artem Lukoianov, Heena Purohit, and Aldo Pareja about this trend. 'I guess the whole beauty of this term is because it so accurately presents what's actually happening,' Lukoianov said. 'You don't even have to read the code that it produces. You … just basically teleprompt to the system, it generates a part of the code for you, and then, quite often, because developers are notorious for being lazy, you don't even read the codes.' 'You don't even try to understand what the code is doing,' added Pareja, theorizing about what will happen when IDEs and other tools start to incorporate unit testing. 'You don't even read the code. You're just feeling it.' Panelist Zach Lloyd talked about the realities of source code management. '(Developers will) get into trouble, and get and they'll try to vibe their way out of it, or they'll get into trouble with their production system and try to vibe their way out of it,' he said. 'So in the terminal, we see it goes beyond producing code, to this whole feeling of: 'let me see if the AI can just fix this thing for me, and maybe I won't have to understand exactly what it's doing.' Lloyd described this power as a kind of double-edged sword: on the one hand, it's, as he said, a 'magical' thing for a developer who feels stuck. On the other hand, he suggested, it can be dangerous for the human coder not to know what the system is doing at all. Panelist Heena Purohit pointed to some challenges with letting the AI have its own project. She argued the systems are not typically good at 'distance thinking,' or how various components of a system interact. 'Sure, you can have millions of lines of code be generated in minutes or seconds, but you still need to understand what the code is actually doing, so that you can troubleshoot it and debug it when you need to,' she said, suggesting that in many cases, scaling might be a problem. By contrast, Lukoianov gave a sort of qualified opinion that we are mostly there, and will get there soon. '(Vibe coding capability) is already good enough for us to stop coding anything,' he said. 'To me, it's more the question of how we engineer the system around this… how do we … provide the correct information to the LLM, how do we summarize our code base, and how do we provide the right tools to the LLM to actually perform … better? in my personal opinion, I feel that like the LLM is already there. It's all about, how do we properly provide this information about your code base, about what you want, about any regulations, security issues that are around there. So it's all just about the correct information, correct inputs, correct tools, to the LLMs, and eventually we'll get there.' In the 1980s, he pointed out, we had to be very close to the hardware – now, it's different. 'You don't think that much about operating systems,' he said. 'You don't think that much about hardware, unless you're working in something very specialized.' Regardless of the change, Pareja argued that full stack developers are still valuable. 'If you're using (tools) to synchronize different processes, and you have a million processes, your system is going to break,' he said. 'You need to understand these constraints.' If I was going to boil down some of the biggest ideas in this panel, I think most of them would be around the need for coding knowledge to manage the detail and periphery of systems development. In other words, the AI can do everything, but it might not do it 100% the way that you need it to be done. And there's that old adage: if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. Maybe LLMs get us 80% of the way there without any oversight, but skipping the context and being completely ignorant of what the machine is doing is typically not a good idea, partly for the reasons that the panelists laid out. So the human in the loop is still relevant for now. But the bottom line is that vibe coding is something so new and fundamental that we'll probably be spending a lot of time figuring out how to do it best.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI COO Says There's No Reason to Believe AI Will Destroy Jobs
OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap says he doesn't see the increasing use of artificial intelligence slowing job growth. In an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Television's Tom Mackenzie, Lightcap explains that he sees AI tools boosting the productivity of workers, especially in the field of software engineering. He says the company is seeing "incredible demand" from businesses and governments for OpenAI's AI products.
TechCrunch
16-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
OpenAI launches Codex, an AI coding agent, in ChatGPT
OpenAI announced on Friday it's launching a research preview of Codex, the company's most capable AI coding agent yet. Codex is powered by codex-1, a version of the company's o3 AI reasoning model optimized for software engineering tasks. OpenAI says codex-1 produces 'cleaner' code than o3, adheres more precisely to instructions, and will iteratively run tests on its code until passing results are achieved. The Codex agent runs in a sandboxed, virtual computer in the cloud. By connecting with GitHub, Codex's environment can come preloaded with your code repositories. OpenAI says the AI coding agent will take anywhere from one to 30 minutes to write simple features, fix bugs, answer questions about your codebase, and run tests, among other tasks. Codex can handle multiple software engineering tasks simultaneously, says OpenAI, and it doesn't limit users from accessing their computer and browser while it's running. What users see when they open up Codex (Credit: OpenAI) Codex is rolling out starting today to subscribers to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team. OpenAI says users will have 'generous access' to Codex to start, but in the coming weeks, the company will implement rate limits for the tool. Users will then have the option to purchase additional credits to use Codex, an OpenAI spokesperson tells TechCrunch. OpenAI plans to expand Codex access to ChatGPT Plus and Edu users soon. AI tools for software engineers, also known as vibe coders, have surged in popularity in recent months. The CEOs of Google and Microsoft claim that roughly 30% of their companies' code is now written by AI. In February, Anthropic released its own agentic coding tool, Claude Code, and in April, Google updated its AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, with more agentic abilities. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW All that vibe coding has made the businesses behind AI coding platforms some of the fastest-growing in tech. Cursor, among the most popular AI coding tools, reached annualized revenue of around $300 million in April and is reportedly raising new funds at a $9 billion valuation. Now, OpenAI wants a piece of the pie. The ChatGPT maker has reportedly closed on a deal to acquire Windsurf, the developer behind another popular AI coding platform, for $3 billion. The launch of Codex shows very clearly that OpenAI is building out its own AI coding tools, in addition. Users with access to Codex can find the tool in ChatGPT's sidebar, and assign the agent new coding tasks by typing a prompt and clicking the 'Code' button. Users can also ask questions about their codebase and click the 'Ask' button. Below the prompting bar, users can see other tasks they've assigned Codex to do, and monitor their progress. In a briefing ahead of Codex's launch, OpenAI's Agents Research Lead, Josh Tobin, told TechCrunch the company eventually wants its AI coding agents to act as 'virtual teammates,' completing tasks autonomously that take human engineers 'hours or even days' to accomplish. OpenAI claims it's already using Codex internally to offload repetitive tasks, scaffold new features, and draft documentation. OpenAI's new coding agent, Codex (Credit: OpenAI) OpenAI Product Lead Alexander Embiricos says a lot of the safety work for the company's o3 model applies to Codex as well. In a blog post, OpenAI says Codex will reliably refuse requests to develop 'malicious software.' Furthermore, Codex operates in an air-gapped environment, with no access to the broader internet or external APIs. This limits how dangerous Codex could be in the hands of a bad actor — but it may also hamper its usefulness. It's worth noting that AI coding agents, much like all generative AI systems today, are prone to mistakes. A recent study from Microsoft found that industry-leading AI coding models, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and o3-mini, struggled to reliably debug software. However, that doesn't seem to be dampening investor excitement in these tools. OpenAI is also updating Codex CLI, the company's recently launched open-source coding agent that runs in your terminal, with a version of its o4-mini model that's optimized for software engineering. That model is now the default in Codex CLI, and will be available in OpenAI's API for $1.50 per 1M input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, more than the entire Lord of the Rings book series) and $6 per 1M output tokens. Codex's launch marks OpenAI's latest effort to beef up ChatGPT with additional products besides the notorious chatbot. In the past year, OpenAI has added priority access to the company's AI video platform, Sora, its research agent, Deep Research, as well as its web browsing agent, Operator, as benefits for subscribers. These offerings could entice more users to sign up for a ChatGPT subscription, and, in the case of Codex specifically, convince existing subscribers to pay OpenAI more money for increased rate limits.
TechCrunch
15-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Programmers bore the brunt of Microsoft's layoffs in its home state as AI writes up to 30% of its code
In Brief Coders were hit hardest among Microsoft's 2,000-person layoff in its home state of Washington, Bloomberg reports. Over 40% of the people laid off were in software engineering, making it by far the largest category, Bloomberg found based on state filings. Relatively few sales or marketing positions were affected, Bloomberg added. To be fair, coders are a big chunk of Microsoft's workforce, although it doesn't disclose the exact proportion. The cuts are part of recent layoffs at Microsoft affecting about 6,000 people. Still, these cuts come after CEO Satya Nadella said last month that up to 30% of the company's code was now written by AI. TechCrunch asked Microsoft if the layoffs were motivated by the rise of AI-assisted coding. The tech giant declined to comment. Microsoft has said the layoffs are aimed at reducing management layers.
