At Robinhood, almost all engineers are vibe coders.
This is what Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on the 20VC podcast that code written by the company's people is difficult to distinguish from AI-generated code. Among the company's engineers, he said “nearly 100%” use AI code editors.
When asked that the percentage of new codes for Robinhood is being generated by AI, TENEV said it was about 50%. That's a higher percentage than what Microsoft and Google said before. CEOs Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai estimate about 30%.
TENEV admitted that 50% of the metrics are inaccurate thanks to the “agent” code editor upgrade.
“I've moved from Github Copilot, an autocomplete system, to something like Windsurf. “It's hard to even tell what human-generated code is.”
Conjecture, TENEV estimated that the “minority” of Robinhood's new code was written by humans.
Robinhood's stock is in tears, trading above 177% since the start of the year, driving the recent rally. Robinhood expanded its Crypto venture by launching a US private stock token. Robinhood's retail investors continue to work, and the company continues to roll out new products like its forecast management hub.
At 20VC, TENEV said AI has helped stabilize the company's costs and efficiency.
“We were pretty moms about how much we used it internally,” Teneff said. “From software engineering to customer support to a very large internal team, the impact it had on the internal team was enormous.”
