Skip to content

Podcast

Can A.I. Already Do Your Job?

The Daily

Source ↗ ← All highlights
  • Origin Story Of Vibe Coding
    • Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” to describe letting AI write code while you supervise.
    • Kevin Roose used AI to build small tools without knowing traditional programming. Transcript: Kevin Roose Vibe coding is a term that was coined about a year ago by a guy named Andre Carpathy, who’s a former programmer at OpenAI, very well known out here in Silicon Valley. And he was describing this thing that he was doing using these new AI coding tools, which is that instead of learning a programming language and writing the code line by line by himself, He would just sort of let the program write the code for him and build software that way. Let the vibes do the work. Let the vibes do the work, exactly. And suddenly, for the first time about a year ago, you didn’t have to know how to code to build software. You could just use these tools. (Time 0:02:30)
  • Lunchbox Buddy Demo
    • Kevin Roose built Lunchbox Buddy to pack his son’s lunch using AI image input.
    • Early tools were clunky and more helpful to professional programmers than beginners. Transcript: Kevin Roose Yeah, so I tried VibeCoding about a year ago when this term first emerged, and I would build these little test tools for myself. I built an app called Lunchbox Buddy, which was basically a way to help me pack my son’s lunch by just taking a photo of whatever was in my fridge and giving it to this tool and saying, like, What are the different combinations of things I could put in this four compartment lunchbox? Natalie Kitroeff Oh my god, that’s amazing. So useful. I want it. Kevin Roose Yeah, I built some other stuff too, but honestly, it was kind of clunky. The tools, basically, you still needed to know a little bit about programming to be able to do this. And they were pretty buggy. I tried to build some stuff to help me sort through my emails, and it couldn’t do it. It was mostly useful to professional programmers. (Time 0:03:23)
  • Agentic Coding Changes Roles
    • Agentic coding gives AI autonomy to plan, choose languages, and coordinate sub-agents.
    • This shifts users from writing code to orchestrating AI teams that execute projects. Transcript: Kevin Roose So the big innovation between last year and now is what is called agentic coding. Agentic coding is basically just a fancy way of saying an AI system that can do much more of the process autonomously. So you still do have to, like, the idea for what you want to build. But then with these new tools, you can just sort of give them a project and they can make a plan. They can decide what programming languages they want to use. They can even create their own little team of agents and say, OK, this agent’s going to go off and do the research. This agent’s going to build the website. This agent’s going to test it. And so you sort of have a little team of robots working for you to do whatever task you’ve given it. (Time 0:04:21)
  • Claude Code Started As A Side Project
    • Claude Code began as a terminal-attached side project by an Anthropic engineer.
    • It spread from engineers to marketing, sales, and finance within the company. Transcript: Kevin Roose So this app, Claude Code, started as a side project. Basically, an engineer at Anthropic named Boris Cherny had an idea. He was trying to sort of get a sense of what Claude Anthropics chatbot could do. So he said, well, what if I just give it my computer? What if I install Claude inside the terminal app, which is the app that you use to write code and interface with your computer if you’re a programmer? And what would happen if I just set Claude loose inside my computer with a bunch of tools, like give it the ability to write scripts, to create files, to organize things, to debug code. And he starts seeing something really interesting happening around the office. His colleagues are starting to use this tool to do their jobs. They’re starting to program with it. It started with the engineers. They’re saying this is really great for coding. At first, it’s maybe 20% of their engineers, then it’s 40%. And now all of them are using it. But it’s also being used by people who are not professional programmers, people in marketing and sales and finance are using this, not to just build little apps, but to automate parts Of their jobs. (Time 0:07:19)
  • Live Website Built In Minutes
    • Kevin demoed Claude Code building a personal website in about 1.5 minutes.
    • The AI generated hundreds of lines of code and produced a working site in real time. Transcript: Kevin Roose We’re inside Cloud Code. And I’m just going to give it a prompt. I’m going to say, build a website for my colleague, Natalie Kittrowev. And I noticed, Natalie, that you don’t have a personal website, at least that I could see. Do you have one? I don’t. Natalie Kitroeff I’m kind of giving over my identity to the New York Times. Kevin Roose No, see, you need one. You are a big time podcast host now. And so you need a website for yourself. So she’s the co-host of The Daily. And the site should look, how do you want it to look? Sleek and professional? Yes. Natalie Kitroeff And cool. Make me look cool, please. Thank you. Kevin Roose And cool. And professional. Make her look cool. And also cool. Natalie Kitroeff Thank you. Kevin Roose She really likes the Philadelphia Eagles. So maybe do it in Eagles colors. Natalie Kitroeff This is getting better and better. All right. Kevin Roose So I hit enter and it says burrowing, which is one of its words that it uses for thinking. Do we know what it’s doing? I promise you, I do not understand what it’s doing. Like a professional coder would know what it is doing. Right. All I know is that it’s doing something and it’s going to think about it. It’s going to make a plan and then it’s going to start building. How long does it take? It depends on the complexity of the task. I’ve had tasks that have taken 10, 20, 30 minutes before, but I think this is going to be just a minute or two at most. Natalie Kitroeff And the idea is that it’s kind of scraping the internet for information about me. Did you tell it to make sure that everyone knows I’m young also? Kevin Roose We can add that in a subsequent version. So it wrote 644 lines of code. Okay, so it’s live. Let’s just see what it looks like together. Natalie Kitroeff What was that, a minute? Kevin Roose That took a minute and 36 seconds. Look at that. Wow. We’ve got a little, like, Eagles Green website. (Time 0:10:00)
  • Playable Game Added By AI
    • Kevin asked Claude Code to add a playable Tecmo Bowl-style game and it delivered.
    • Natalie and Kevin played the generated game live on the site. Transcript: Natalie Kitroeff I mean, this is insane. It’s wild. Kevin Roose I mean, this is why people are freaking out about AI right now, because this was not possible even couple of months ago. And now it is. Okay. So now our video game is done. Should we go see it? Natalie Kitroeff Yes, please. Kevin Roose Okay. So here’s Natalie’s Tecmo Bowl. Natalie Kitroeff Oh, my God. Kevin Roose And do you see it? Oh, my God. Natalie Kitroeff Yeah, I do. Kevin Roose So it says press space to hike and arrow keys to move. Okay, so we got to run. We got to run. Natalie Kitroeff Touchdown, Eagles! Yeah, go birds. This is incredible. Wow, this is like, I feel like I’m going to draw a lot of people to my new website with this feature. Kevin Roose Yeah, you’re going to be getting so much traffic. Natalie Kitroeff Okay. (Time 0:13:48)
  • AI As Economic Workers
    • These agentic systems are moving from novelty to tools that can perform economic work.
    • They can become de facto workforce members, automating entry-level tasks across industries. Transcript: Kevin Roose This is something that people inside the AI industry have been saying is coming for a long time. But until recently, people couldn’t really see it for themselves or try it for themselves. And, you know, ChatGPT has been around for three years now. And for most people, the novelty is sort of wearing off. You know, it’s a fancy Google. You can get a meal plan. You can sort of give it some questions. It can help you write your emails or memos or things like that. But it doesn’t sort of shock you anymore. This feels different to me and I think to a lot of other people when you can actually build something useful without knowing how to write code. And I think this is what people think is the thing that’s going to take AI from just kind of being a fancier Google to something that genuinely changes how people work. Natalie Kitroeff When you say that this is something that tech companies have been saying is coming for a long time, what is the it that is coming? What makes it special? Is it just the complexity of the stuff it can do, or is it the utility of it? Kevin Roose I think it’s the utility, but it’s also the economic value. This kind of agentic system can actually do work. It can do tasks. It can perform things that humans would have had to do by hand. (Time 0:17:01)
  • Hiring Patterns Are Shifting
    • Early data shows a decline in junior software employment as AI tools reduce hiring needs.
    • Companies may need fewer entry-level developers as agents handle much of the coding. Transcript: Kevin Roose So there was a study from Stanford recently that looked at payroll records and found that employment for young software engineers, just people who are early in their careers, has dropped About 20 percent from its peak in 2022. So companies that used to hire five or 10 people to write code for them may only need one or two now with a bunch of AI tools. Natalie Kitroeff Can I ask, we were pointing to issues with my beautiful website. How good is this stuff? I mean, can it debug itself? Because I guess I’m seeing that there is also a lot of doubt and skepticism that you can really do this only with an AI tool at this point. Kevin Roose Well, coding is an interesting test ground for this because in some sense, it is very verifiable. The code either runs or it doesn’t. And so in some sense, it’s very easy to tell. I mean, the website we built you, it works. You can go visit it on the web. It has a playable video game inside of it. So yes, there are a lot of software engineers who are still saying these coding agents, they’re not perfect. (Time 0:19:08)
  • Models Helping Build Models
    • AI models are improving fast partly because they assist in building and training future models.
    • Recursive self-improvement accelerates progress as models help design better successors. Transcript: Kevin Roose So part of it is just that the models themselves, the things that are sort of underneath tools like CloudCode, are just getting better very rapidly. And part of that is because they’re being trained on more coding data. So they’re sort of improving over time. The other really interesting and really important thing that is starting to happen is that these AI tools are building versions of themselves. They are starting to improve themselves. What? Natalie Kitroeff What does that mean? Kevin Roose So OpenAI’s latest coding model, which is called GPT 5.3 Codex, was used to help build itself. Early versions of the model were used to make changes to the training runs for later versions. So this is happening across all of the leading AI companies right now, which is that you have these systems which can build websites, which can automate certain financial or legal tasks. They can also help train AI models. (Time 0:20:40)
  • Prepare For Rapid Agentic Improvements
    • Expect agentic tools to improve dramatically within a year and handle bigger problems.
    • Prepare for faster adoption in new companies centered around AI-driven workflows. Transcript: Kevin Roose Mean, my honest prediction is that a year from now, these agentic tools will be dramatically better, right? They’ll handle big, complex problems. You won’t have to hold their hand as much. They will become full-fledged members of the workforce. And, you know, a lot of companies will still do things the old way because institutions are very slow to change, as we know. But there will be this sort of new kind of company that is emerging with AI work at the center of it. And I think that’s going to be a really fast-growing part of the economy. I think the job market impacts that we’re starting to see hints of today will become much clearer a year from now. But honestly, I lose a lot of visibility myself. (Time 0:27:00)