Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto: Why Claude Code Isn't It & What Comes After the IDE

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
We are here live at the AI Engineer Summit with Steve Yegge, the legendary Steve Yegge of Stevie's Tech Talks, Stevie's Platforms Brands, and most recently, SourceGraph and AMP. Welcome. And most recently, Vibe Coding.

**Steve Yegge** (0:16)
That is right, the Vibe Coding Book.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
So this is the big Vibe Coding discussion. In the pre-chat, we were discussing the intersection of Vibe Coding and AI Engineering. So we got the kind of movement leaders of both sides here. How do you see it?

**Steve Yegge** (0:28)
It's absolutely a movement, right? You got to get people behind it. I mean, there's a, I said at the end of my talk today, that there's a huge backlash, and the backlash is only just brewing now. So you and I are pushing forward, right, on these waves of, you know, AI Engineering is about building AI-enabled applications and being in AI. And Vibe Coding is about abandoning the old ways of producing software and embracing the new ways, right? And both of these are making people pretty mad, right?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:00)
I don't, I think they're mad if their identity is tied to the way that they work today with no changes, no room for changes.

**Steve Yegge** (1:08)
Yeah, so I'll start with my first hot take.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:10)
Okay, let's go.

**Steve Yegge** (1:12)
There is a demographic that is the most affected by that. Their identity is the most tied up with the way that they work.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:19)
Okay.

**Steve Yegge** (1:19)
It's not junior engineers. It's not non-engineers. They're all vibe coding. It's senior engineers, senior leaders, people who have... So basically, you can narrow it down to 12 to 15 years of experience. They hate vibe coding and they hate AI and they're online going, my 15 years is better than that AI.
I don't know if you saw Jordan Hubbard's post from NVIDIA where he just laid out some really nice advice on how to get the most out of agents as you're coding. And this guy posted and he's like, yeah, you know, no. You stick with your junior director stuff and leave the programming to programmers, right? When you have 15 years of experience like me, then you're qualified to talk, right? So I said something to him like, I think you need to learn to read a clock. And he's like, until you have 15 years of experience. And I'm like, well, you got more experience than him. Or I have 45 So should I like go to 60 before I can talk to you? Or should I like cut out 30 years of experience so I can be as dumb as you? Those are my options. And so I don't know. I guess I'll see him in 15 years.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:25)
So, okay, I think there is one element that I'm trying to figure out of, well, these people have to coexist, right? And most companies are going to have a mix. Even OpenAI, by the way, we talked about this last night at dinner. Guys, OpenAI has people who don't use AI to code.

**Steve Yegge** (2:41)
They have people who don't use Codex. They probably are using Cursor or something.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:46)
Okay.

**Steve Yegge** (2:46)
But they're not using the agentic loops, right?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:49)
Yeah.

**Steve Yegge** (2:49)
And yeah, it's so, you know, we talked to, you know, Andrew Glover there, you know, the director of DevProd. And from what he was saying, they've been planning on going public with this once they have more data about it.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:01)
Yeah.

**Steve Yegge** (3:02)
Anecdotally, they're sharing that performance, the performance differences like 10x by any way that you measure it. So lines of code, commits, business impact, whatever. And it's so stark and pronounced that the people who aren't adopting it are now 10x less productive at performance review time. Two people, same title, same job, and all of a sudden, one of them is 10x as productive in the other one. What do you do? And the answer is you panic. You actually go to HR and you go to legal and you're like, what are our options here? Because the time is coming, okay, here's another hot take, all right? If you're still using an IDE to develop code by January 1st, you're a bad engineer. There's a hot take for you, right? Now, you still have a, what, five, six weeks to still be an okay engineer while you're using your IDE, but this is the time that you need to drop it and learn how agents code, okay, because it's a skill set. I mean, it's so complicated. We wrote this book about it, me and Gene Kim, because we were playing with it ourselves last year and blogging about it and talking about it, and every blog post was 30 pages. And it's like, what do you do with 30 page blog post? That's long even for me, right? And at some point I was just, man, like the skills that you got to learn in order to get the AI to do the things that everyone's mad because it's doing them, right, because everybody's like, well, I tried it. I spent two hours with it and all it produced was garbage. And the answer is actually you have to spend 200 hours with it. You have to spend 2000 hours with it. And that's not actually an exaggeration. Gene just pulled up a study that showed that you actually have to spend a year or 2000 hours with AI before you trust it. And what does trust mean? Trust in this case specifically means before you as a user can predict what it's going to do. And if it's unpredictable, of course you're going to be mad. But as soon as you've worked with it for a full year to where you fully understand its capabilities and its drawbacks, which haven't really fundamentally changed, it's gotten more capable.