In a surprising nod to the developer community, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed he enjoys “vibe coding with Replit” in his spare time — a moment that Replit CEO Amjad Masad quickly spotlighted and posted a snippet of the interview on LinkedIn, signaling a major endorsement for the fast-growing AI-powered coding platform.
“Vibe coding” is a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, and refers to an approach to building software where a person describes a coding problem to a Large Language Model (LLM), which generates the actual code. Vibe coding shifts the programmer’s role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code. Vibe coding is said to allow even people who don’t know how to code to create digital products like apps and websites.
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“I was vibe coding with Replit a few weeks ago. I mean the power of what you’re going to be able to create on the web; we haven’t given that power to developers in 25 years,” Pichai said in the original interview.
Pichai’s interest in AI-assisted coding is unsurprising. In another interview with The Verge, Pichai said he believed AI will be “bigger than the internet.”
“I think it’s an exciting time to be a consumer, it’s an exciting time to be a developer. I’m looking forward to it,” he said.
The shift towards vibe coding has led to a lot of interest as well as concern. While some view it as a positive shift that saves time and makes coding accessible, others have raised concerns over traditional coding “dying,” and programmers losing jobs.
Garry Tan, CEO and president of Y Combinator said, “A team of just 10 vibe coders can easily be on their way to building the next multi-million-dollar startup. That work otherwise might have taken 50 or 100 engineers.” Tan also recently shared a statistic which said 25% of the current crop of Y Combinator startups used AI LLMs to write 95% of their lines of code.
However, not everyone has been taken in by the hype around vibe coding. “You should still learn to code. And you should start as early as possible,” Santiago Valdaramma, founder of Tideily, wrote recently on X. Others have pointed out that the “coding is dead” has been largely pushed by “VCs, influencers, and CEOs of vibe-coding tools.” Pichai also said they’re still hiring “superstar engineers” and that demand has shifted, not vanished.
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While Masad had previously stated he no longer believes people should learn to code, he also said that while using Replit, people aren’t avoiding code but “interacting with it on a different level.” “The agent unfolds the code in front of you. You’re still responsible for what it does,” he said. Replit is an American AI company whose agent technology converts plain English descriptions into functioning software.
Founded in 2016 by Jordanian programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and Haya Odeh, it was originally created as an online integrated development environment. It creates software using AI, with a platform called Agent. Replit has transformed from a collaborative coding platform into an AI-powered software creation ecosystem centered around the ability to build complete applications by describing them in natural language.