Screenshots of Chloe Samaha's startup bond website. Previous versions were almost completely encoded with atmosphere.
bondapp.io/screenshot by npr
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bondapp.io/screenshot by npr
Chloe Samaha was not trained to write software. However, she and their San Francisco-based startup Bond partners have obtained a new online productivity manager and a practical version of the website It runs in less than a day.
“He built the entire backend in six hours on his way home from a ski trip, and I built the frontend like an hour and a half.
They did it primarily through “vibe coding” – creating software using fast-evolving artificial intelligence chatbots and other new AI tools.
Samaha helped move from the concept of what is called “AI Chiefs for CEOs and busy executives,” to prototypes and then to products in the market at the speed of lightning.
It also highlights the advances in AI that open up creator possibilities and shaking the world of software engineering.
Samaha, 21, said that the Bond product, called “Donna” (named after a character from the TV series suit), tap on user data from various platforms such as email, calendar, Slack, and more, and use AI to answer questions about project and team performance progress immediately.
The company recently received a $500,000 investment from Venture Capital Firm and Tech Incubator Y Combinator.
Tom Bromfield is a group partner there. He said the term “vibe coding” was coined earlier this year by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of Openai.
“I've really noticed, the idea is that people are no longer checking the code that AI is generating on a line-by-line basis.
And, knowing how to code, Bromfield rejigs his blog and tries his hand at vibe coding to create a website called Recipe Ninja from scratch. There is a library of recipes, where chefs can talk to it and ask AI-driven sites to create new recipes.
“It's probably like 30,000 lines of code. It took me, I don't know, maybe a year to build,” he said. “It wasn't overnight, but it probably took 100 hours.”
Blomfield said he hopes that AI coding will fundamentally change the software industry. “Instead of getting coding support, we have real AI coders, then AI project managers, AI designers, and over time, all of these AI managers, and we're going to flock to these things,” he said.
Where people fit this, he said, “It's a question we're all working on.”
In 2021, Blomfield said in a podcast that startup founders should learn code first and foremost. I don't know if he will give that advice today. Because he believes that coders and software engineers will eventually be able to quit their jobs.
“The coder feels like he's in his hands and caring for an organic garden,” he said. “But we're producing these superhuman agents. These agents will be as good as the best coders in the world very soon.”
Others are not sure the future of coders will be very harsh.
The tools available for vibe coding are currently lowering barriers to software development. For many designers, it is a boon. Rather than handing over ideas to a software engineer and creating prototypes one by one, you can try a lot of things quickly.
“There are 10 ideas that are not explored today, simply because we don't have time,” said Yuhki Yamashita, chief product officer at Figma, a leading design software company.
Earlier this month, Figma launched an AI-enabled product that enables designers to effectively enable vibrator cords. “So we think more ideas will be explored and more ideas will be validated much faster,” Yamahashi said.
Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft-owned software development platform Github, said AI is a “great opportunity for software developers.” He sees a future like a conductor who governs an AI coding agent's orchestra.
“The question is, from my perspective, it's not that much. Will there be no work? But how will work evolve?” he said.
“There's a commoditization of simple tasks that AI can do. There's always. If you can automate, developers do that because there's a lot to do,” he continued.
Adam Resnick, research manager at Tech Consultancy IDC, said that even if work is moving forward quickly, software developers worried about their work still have runways.
“The vast majority of developers use AI tools in some way,” he said. “And what we see is that a fairly high percentage of code output from these tools requires further curation by experienced people.”
And he said that it's a job that AI can't do. At least not yet.
