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An interesting essay about the issues with vibe coding ...
A marketing manager with no engineering background opens Cursor on Monday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, she has a working customer-facing app. It looks polished. It performs the core task. She demos it to her VP, who forwards it to their CMO, who then shows it in the executive staff meeting as evidence that the team is "moving at AI speed."
By Friday, it is in front of customers.
No one asked who owned the decision to ship it. No one tested it against the conditions it would actually face. No one had the cultural standing to say this looks great, and we are not putting it into production. The prototype became a product because the organization had no system for telling the difference.
I watched a version of this scenario play out recently in a boardroom. A senior executive demoed an AI-built internal tool. The room admired the speed. What received less attention were the harder questions: Who would own it after launch? Who would maintain it? And what would happen when it produced an answer that was confidently wrong?
This is what vibe coding is about to expose across businesses. The companies that think the story is about software are going to lose to the companies that understand the story is about judgment.
The Real Trend Is Decision Compression
Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" in early 2025 to describe an AI-assisted style of building software through natural-language prompting, often without close inspection of the underlying code. Google Cloud describes vibe coding as a software development practice that makes app building more accessible, especially for people with limited programming experience. Tools like Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bolt, GitHub Copilot Workspace, v0 by Vercel and Claude Code have moved the practice from novelty to workplace reality with stunning speed.
All of that is true. None of it is the point.
The point is that vibe coding collapses the distance between idea and artifact from months to hours. When that distance collapses, every quality-control mechanism your organization developed over the last 30 years gets bypassed by default. Design review. Security review. Legal review. Brand review. The simple friction of having to convince an engineer your idea was worth building. That is a governance story, not a software story. It is happening at every level of the org chart simultaneously.
[Source]: Forbes
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @07:07PM (2 children)
>Remember that the entire point of a company is to move money from the pockets of customers to those of the shareholders in the quickest and cheapest way possible, nothing more and nothing less.
I work for a company that is "mission driven" and most of the mission is about things other than "make a fair profit" - but that element has to be in there, because if it isn't, the company ceases to exist rather quickly.
In a perfectly frictionless competitive market, only those companies which move money into the shareholders' pockets the most quickly and efficiently will survive. As business has been "streamlined" by technology, we have moved closer and closer to this reality.
The advertising spend thread is bleeding into my thought process here, but: money is nothing more (and nothing less) than a way to influence the behavior of people. You may think that a ton of copper has a value of $13,000US, but what that $13,000US really is, is monetary incentive sufficient to get people to deliver a ton of copper into your possession (FOB, most likely...) The copper may have been recycled, or mined and smelted from ore, or stored in a warehouse for a decade, but all in all, the market has currently decided that one ton of copper is exchangeable for $13,000US because that's what it takes to pay for the warehouse storage, and/or the recycling, mining, smelting, shipping, handling, regulatory overhead, corruption, security, taxes, and everything else that goes into delivering a ton of copper. The cost of the warehouse isn't about the cost of the materials of the building, it's mostly about the labor, and the labor that goes into provisioning of the supplies, and cost of maintenance, debt service, and the other various payola/taxes required for the warehouse owner to continue their "quiet enjoyment" of the property.
All the money eventually ends up being used to convince somebody somewhere to do something at some time, because that's actually the only thing money can do. This is also why advertising is so valuable, because advertising also convinces people to do things - just like money does.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday May 02, @10:18AM (1 child)
Here's one: all companies tend towards Private Equity funds.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by sonamchauhan on Saturday May 02, @01:19PM
I miss the days when corporate ambition was limited to embedding an email client