One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code.<\/p>\n
Some call it \u201cvibe-coding\u201d because it encourages an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work as human software developers work through big ideas. Others dislike that term. But there\u2019s no question that these tools are transforming the job experience for many tech workers amid an intense rivalry between leading AI companies<\/a> to make the best one. <\/p>\n \u201cThe essence of it is you\u2019re no longer in the nitty-gritty syntax,\u201d said Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code. \u201cYou\u2019re not looking at every single line of code. You\u2019re more trying to communicate this higher-level goal of what you want to accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n Wu added, however, that \u201dvibe-coding\u201d is not a term she uses. \u201cWe definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic launched the latest version of its flagship Claude chatbot on Monday, boasting that Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be the \u201cworld\u2019s best\u201d for coding and other complex tasks.<\/p>\n Large language models behind generative AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini are capable of many things, from homework help<\/a> to organizing meal plans<\/a>, but the \u201ctop use case\u201d for most businesses has been in coding and software engineering, said Gartner analyst Philip Walsh.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is often the first thing large organizations go after,\u201d Walsh said. \u201cI think there\u2019s broad recognition among these AI model providers that coding is really where they\u2019re getting the most traction.\u201d<\/p>\n And while Walsh said Anthropic\u2019s products are a favorite for software developers, it is hardly the only player in a rapidly growing and consolidating market. <\/p>\n San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area remain the center of the battle to make the best AI coder, home not just to fierce rivals OpenAI and Anthropic but startups like Anysphere, Cognition and Harness, as well as Microsoft-owned GitHub.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the most competitive space in the industry right now,\u201d said Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, speaking by video call from the startup\u2019s office in Mountain View, California.<\/p>\n Windsurf\u2019s coding assistant launched less than a year ago, but as its popularity grew, hitting 200,000 users in its first two months, it found itself at the center of a bidding war between tech giants. OpenAI sought to acquire it. Then, Google scooped up Windsurf\u2019s founders and research team, leaving a shell of a company that Cognition acquired in July.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a really volatile time at Windsurf,\u201d Wang wrote to employees in July as he announced the merger with Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin. Two months later, the two companies\u2019 integration is \u201cgoing really well,\u201d Wang told The Associated Press from a conference room called New Kelp City, named for a setting in SpongeBob SquarePants.<\/p>\n Some AI coding assistants automatically finish the code that human programmers are writing, much like the \u201cautocorrect\u201d features that suggest the next lines of an email or text. More advanced tools known as AI agents are given more autonomy to access computer systems and do the work themselves.<\/p>\n Anthropic said its new Sonnet 4.5, on a test before its public release Monday, was able to code autonomously for more than 30 hours on a project for London-based startup iGent.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s first coding assistant was developed largely by accident when the company\u2019s Boris Cherny built an internal toy project and started using it to accelerate his own work. Then the rest of his team adopted it.<\/p>\n \u201cOver time, we realized that it was just virally spreading within Anthropic,\u201d Wu said.<\/p>\n Anthropic has said coding is the top use for Claude, with about 39% of its users saying they use the chatbot for coding. <\/p>\n OpenAI, by contrast, says writing is the most common work task for ChatGPT, with coding and self-expression as more \u201cniche\u201d activities. Even so, OpenAI has sought to catch up, introducing in September a new GPT-5-Codex that it says can work for longer on complex coding tasks.<\/p>\n Among the most coveted customers for big AI model developers are coding startups like Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, which relies heavily on Anthropic\u2019s Claude and recently cemented a partnership with OpenAI. <\/p>\n It was Cursor\u2019s Composer, combined with Anthropic\u2019s Claude Sonnet, that prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase \u201cvibe-coding\u201d in February. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a new kind of coding I call \u2018vibe coding\u2019, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n It was \u201cgetting too good,\u201d he said, so much so that he could speak his instructions and \u201cbarely even touch the keyboard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic shipped Claude Code a few weeks later.<\/p>\n Some platforms, like Sweden-based Lovable, cater to vibe-coders with an approach that encourages anyone to \u201ccreate apps and websites by chatting with AI.\u201d But most tools are designed for professionals with programming expertise.<\/p>\n The phenomenon has raised fears of job loss<\/a> in software careers, fueled by comments from tech CEOs who say AI is speeding up software development and making their teams more efficient.<\/p>\n Walsh said Gartner\u2019s position is that AI will not replace software engineers and will actually require more.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so much software that isn\u2019t created today because we can\u2019t prioritize it,\u201d Walsh said. \u201cSo it\u2019s going to drive demand for more software creation, and that\u2019s going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Economists, however, are also<\/a> beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers. In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University<\/a> found \u201csubstantial declines in employment for early-career workers\u2019\u2019 \u2014 ages 22-25 \u2014 in fields most exposed to AI.<\/p>\n Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier.<\/p>\n Karpathy didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. But the idea that non-technical people in an organization can \u201cvibe-code\u201d business-ready software is a misunderstanding of what Karpathy meant when he came up with the term, Walsh said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there,\u201d Walsh said. \u201cThese tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what \u2018good\u2019 looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n Wu said she\u2019s told her younger sister, who\u2019s still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it\u2019s still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn\u2019t always make the right decisions,\u201d Wu said. \u201cA lot of times the human intuition is really important.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the hottest markets in the artificial intelligence industry is selling chatbots that write computer code. Some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,4186,60460,289,290,60462,79,1374,11669,8479,18,13658,3334,19,1297,5885,17,60461,3521,5762,21574,60380,864,82,4077,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-93302","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-anthropic-pbc","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-boris-cherny","14":"tag-business","15":"tag-california","16":"tag-claude-code","17":"tag-claude-sonnet","18":"tag-eire","19":"tag-gartner","20":"tag-general-news","21":"tag-ie","22":"tag-inc","23":"tag-information-technology","24":"tag-ireland","25":"tag-jeff-wang","26":"tag-lifestyle","27":"tag-microsoft-corp","28":"tag-openai-inc","29":"tag-philip-walsh","30":"tag-software","31":"tag-technology","32":"tag-u-s-news","33":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}