Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a strong believer in “vibe-coding”, a term to describe the process of developing software by prompting an AI model with text.
“Sometimes I think vibe coding feels like it’s the thing that creates slop. And that is a problem if you really don’t think of this as having fantastic world class tooling that allows you to use these powers in order to be able to ultimately create more great artifacts of code,” Nadella said during a fireside chat at the GitHub Universe event in San Francisco on Wednesday.
As much as Microsoft’s CEO and other high-ranking executives at the world’s leading tech companies come in support for vibe coding, where someone without technical skills can learn to code, develop applications without years of training, and speed up projects, there is also resentment within the developer community. Some junior engineers fear it may displace jobs, while others worry about the potential spread of “buggy code” and the lack of experienced developers to build reliable software.
Popularised by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy earlier this year, “vibe coding”, a concept where developers rely almost entirely on AI to build software may seem controversial, but Nadella’s statement makes it clear that AI is changing how developers write software, and vibe coding is here to stay.
Nadella maintains that humans are still needed in the loop. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)
For years, learning to code and building a career as a software engineer was seen as a ticket to success. But with the rise of cutting-edge coding models from leading AI research labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, that notion has flipped. It’s no longer just experienced engineers who can write code. As these models have advanced and gained “agentic” skills that allow them to use software programs, manipulate files, and access online services, both engineers and non-engineers have started using them to build entire apps and websites.
However, some blame AI for downsizing developer teams or even eliminating them altogether amid mass layoffs at big tech companies.
But as AI becomes more advanced and continues to shake up the world of software engineering, Nadella maintains that humans are still needed in the loop even as vibe coding increasingly becomes part of developers’ daily practice. “In the era when artificial intelligence (AI) writes code, developers are still at the center of creation. Now we are witnessing the birth of a new tool chain where humans and agents create code together,” he said.
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At the GitHub Universe event in San Francisco, the big conversation has been about how artificial intelligence is changing the relationship between developers and machines. Generative AI tools for coding represent one of the biggest shifts in software creation since the rise of the personal computer.
From Microsoft’s perspective, GitHub fits right into its long-term strategy – after all, GitHub is the center of open-source software development. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)
In fact, tech companies have begun using AI to generate an increasing share of their new code, and AI agents are starting to take on more complex programming tasks. The job of a software engineers isn’t disappearing – it’s evolving rapidly.
Billions of dollars have been invested in artificial intelligence, and while questions remain about how tech companies will recoup that investment, early signs indicate that demand for higher-level software developers who can leverage AI remains strong, while demand for lower-skill programmers, whose work is easier to automate with AI tools, is declining.
“When I started coding, I used the assembly language, and then a compiler appeared, and people created the code and another code executed it,” Nadella said. “Now we are at a stage where the code itself is generated through the agent.” He added that AI tools represent a new development revolution but expressed concern that progress could stall if developers don’t know how to handle errors. For this reason, the best ‘tooling’ is important.
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GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and it allows users to store, share and collaborate on code. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)
Nadella reaffirmed that Microsoft’s long-standing philosophy is “developer-centric.” “MS originally started out as a developer tool company,” he said. It is natural for GitHub, Visual Studio, and VS Code to be connected as one, he said. “The platform should not be a closed ecosystem, but an open structure that anyone can expand.”
As AI radically changes the software industry, Nadella advised, “What AI-era developers need is not only ‘what to make’ but also meta-learning to learn ‘how to make’.” “Now we have to move towards a development culture where we treat agents like new compilers, learning and collaborating constantly,” he added.
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