Vibe coding is shaking up software development, and an Amazon executive in charge of developing the company’s AI agents thinks it’s here to stay.
Deepak Singh, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ developer agents and experiences division, told Business Insider that software developers are using increasingly powerful AI agents to improve their productivity.
“The way I like to state it is your AI software has gone from ‘help me type faster’ — a coding companion — to being a true pair programmer that helps you build your software by working with you,” Singh said.
Vibe coding is a term coined in February by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy to describe giving AI prompts to write code. As he puts it, developers can “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.”
While some fear vibe coding may mean fewer software developer roles, Singh said conversations with customers haven’t revolved around finding ways of replacing human workers with AI agents.
Others, like Singh, see vibe coding as a way for developers to free up their time to focus on more important aspects of their jobs — such as problem-solving.
“A really good engineer is one that can take a problem, shine a light upon it, and clarify,” Singh said, pointing to tenets Amazon lays out for its legions of software developers and engineers. “It’s not just about writing the most complex code. It’s about simplifying a complex problem.”
Developers have long been interested in how AI can help them. When ChatGPT first arrived in late 2022, developers were quick to adopt the generative AI tool to help them code — even if the chatbot was prone to generating errors.
Back then, developers could find value by getting generative AI to help speed up the line-by-line process of writing code. They could “add a command and have the command write the code for them,” as Singh put it.
This year, tech companies have been launching a growing number of AI models with the ability to reason and spend longer on problems — a key reason vibe coding is having its moment. Amazon made Q Developer, its own AI assistant for software developers, generally available in April 2024. This week, the company unveiled a feature for developers to interact with Q in different languages, such as Spanish, Korean, or Hindi.
For Singh, the best developers are those who are “very clear in the guidance they’re giving the AI.” They’re the ones who are able to “move very quickly,” he said.
Some AWS customers appear to be successfully vibe coding. Singh gave the example of the National Australia Bank, claiming that half the code that goes into production is from Q Developer, not handwritten by a human at the bank, he said.
“The reason vibe coding is such a vibe, no pun intended, is because developers enjoy it and they’re able to make progress,” Singh said.
