• Many companies are encouraging employees to vibe code. But there are limits.
• Developers say vibe coding is best for low-stakes experimentation and not critical work.
• Still, the buzz around vibe coding has produced a funding frenzy in recent months.

In late June, the CEO of a tech startup halted all software development at the company. He wanted to ensure every team member who worked with code was up to speed on the latest trend: vibe coding.

"You start to realize, wow, these things could move way faster," Rowan Trollope, the CEO of Redis, a software company, told Business Insider.

He immediately approved the use of all AI-assisted coding tools. Then the company launched a weeklong hackathon that challenged teams of employees to "use all the latest and greatest AI technologies to do something cool," Trollope said.

Companies have found, however, that despite the excitement — and the millions in funding pouring into vibe coding companies — the technology is still limited. So, many CEOs are developing new policies and tools to maximize the benefits of vibe coding while mitigating the pitfalls.

Vibe coding is when developers (or anyone, really) prompt AI to generate code. In a survey of hundreds of engineers in May, Jellyfish, a software intelligence platform, found that 90% of them had integrated AI into their work, up from 61% just a year ago.

Vibe coding is now a marketable skill in Silicon Valley. Companies from Visa to Reddit to DoorDash are posting jobs that require vibe coding experience or familiarity with AI coding tools. Meta now allows job candidates to use an AI assistant in their coding interviews.

The term was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February. "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," Karpathy wrote in a post on X. "I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works."

Limits to the technology remain, however. Though vibe coding promises quick productivity gains and allows people with little coding experience to create software, tech executives say AI is still prone to mistakes, often writes unnecessarily long code, or lacks the proper architecture. So Trollope and other tech CEOs have had to introduce parameters for its use.

Trollope said vibe coding is best for building proof of concepts, writing tests, and validating existing code, but not necessarily developing any of the company's core software. "It's still not in a place yet where we would trust it with our core technology," he said.

While still limited, this new, more freewheeling approach has gained momentum in part thanks to the money flowing into vibe coding platforms. Last month, Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor, announced a $900 million Series C fundraise at a $9.9 billion valuation. Wix, a web-development platform, announced that it had acquired the vibe coding platform Base44 for $80 million.

Replit, a code editor, saw revenue grow fivefold in September after it released Agent, a coding assistant that works with natural language prompts. By June, the company landed a new $250 million funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion, according to Forbes. Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable, one of Europe's fastest-growing startups, raised $200 million in Series A funding in July at a $1.8 billion valuation, according to PitchBook.

The funding frenzy pushed Airtable, a database development platform, to relaunch last month as a fully AI-native platform. As part of the overhaul, the company created an app-building assistant called Omni for vibe coders. It allows developers to "conversationally vibe generate the app they want, but understand what's been generated all the way down to the data and logic layer as well," Airtable said in a blog post announcing the overhaul.

"There's still a question of: Is that an AI tourist attraction? Is it going to be durable? Is it going to be high churn?" Airtable CEO Howie Liu told Business Insider. But "all these people are coming in and pulling out their credit cards to try it out." For Airtable, "not fully reinventing ourselves is kind of like a guaranteed path to obsolescence," Liu said.

With the launch of Omni, Liu also saw an opportunity to correct some of the problems that come with vibe coding.

With vibe coding, "you're not really inspecting the code, you're not really thinking about the technical architecture, you're just telling it what you want it to build and kind of like clicking the 'I'm feeling lucky button,'" Liu said. "The magical thing is like the AI has gotten good enough that it seemingly just works some of the time." But even apps that "seemingly work" can be riddled with errors and security vulnerabilities at their deeper, infrastructure layers.

In a perfect world, developers could leverage artificial general intelligence to code apps given the breadth of information that developers need to reason through, Liu said. Until then, developers need a "two-way feedback loop between the agent that is building the code, or building the app, and the user, the human, who's guiding it and saying, 'here's what I actually want you to build.'"

At Redis, humans are convening internal groups to share best prompting practices to improve their part of the equation, Trollope said. "I think people do go on a journey where you start very small and you very quickly realize the prompts can get longer and longer and more and more complicated," he said.

Reddit announced today that it has started verifying UK users' ages before letting them "view certain mature content" in order to comply with the country's Online Safety Act.

Reddit said that users "shouldn't need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions," but that it will comply with the law by verifying age in a way that protects users' privacy. "Using Reddit has never required disclosing your real world identity, and these updates don't change that," Reddit said.

Reddit said it contracted with the company Persona, which "performs the verification on either an uploaded selfie or a photo of your government ID. Reddit will not have access to the uploaded photo, and Reddit will only store your verification status along with the birthdate you provided so you won't have to re-enter it each time you try to access restricted content."

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Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI.

The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is "going really well," CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they're the key to letting people unlock useful information from its huge trove of posts and communities.

Reddit Answers is the first big user-facing piece of the company's AI push. Like other AI search tools, Reddit Answers will show an AI-generated summary to a query. But Reddit Answers also very prominently links to where the content came from - and as a user, you also know that the link will point you to another place on Reddit instead of some SEO-driven garbage. It also helps that the citations feel much more prominent than on tools like Google's AI Mode - a tool that news publishers have criticized as "theft."

"If you just want the short summary, it's there," Slowe says. "If you want to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

• The Chase Sapphire Reserve was once the hottest card for millennials. I didn't have one and felt left out and bitter.
• Now, Chase has changed the card's fees and rewards structure. It's $795 for a personal card. Some people say they'll cancel.
• For me, schadenfreude is almost as satisfying as a good deal.

Some financial windfalls are all about the timing — and luck: A handful of California gold nuggets in 1848. A SoHo loft in 1984. Bitcoin in 2013. A home mortgage rate in 2020.

I've made peace with missing out on some of life's chances to accidentally inflate my financial standing in the world. But the one that has always made me slightly sick to my stomach is missing out on the late 2016 Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card points bonanza.

Now, my painful case of FOMO has been cured.

Last week, Chase said it was revamping the Sapphire Reserve — and upping its annual fee to $795, from the current $550. And it's making a bunch of changes to its rewards structure, which some people are downright furious about. They say they'll cancel. (Chase says its card will become even more valuable, with "over $2,700 in annual value.")

Well, as a world-class hater, sore loser, and jealous snake, I couldn't be more thrilled.

When the new yearly fee and rewards were announced last week, I watched in absolute glee as friends of mine and strangers on the internet lamented and wailed at the fact that the card that had once showered them with rewards points would not be worth the fee (again, only for some people).

The Chase Sapphire Reserve card had attained a millennial mythos akin only to avocado toast and entitled attitudes. It came during the peak of the ZIRP and "millennial lifestyle subsidy" eras: Ubers were cheap, and the credit card points flowed like The Fat Jewish's personal rosé brand. The card — especially if you signed up in the early days — gave you a massive points bonus that could be used for travel or other perks.

It seemed almost impossible not to have the credit card make you money (of course, assuming you paid off your balances and wisely used the points).

I never had the Chase Sapphire Reserve; when it launched, my friends were excited and extolling its virtues, but I thought I needed another credit card and was intimidated by the points gaming. At some point, I realized I had missed the boat. I didn't get in while the getting was good.

Now, I've been reading the r/SapphireReserve subreddit with glee, seeing some of the former evangelists of the card defeated by its new fee. The main post about the news: "Welp. It's bad and official."

I should note here that the card may indeed still be a good deal for some people — it matters how much you spend, and what kind of rewards/perks you're most interested in.

The perks, however, are not exactly what everyone wants, like Apple TV+ or Apple Music subscriptions (less appealing for a Spotify user). There are credits for certain hotels from Chase's selection of hand-picked hotels (which may not be the ones you want). If you spend $75,000 a year on the card, you will get status on Southwest Airlines.

But as one Redditor said: "Who is spending $75k per year on this card that also wants status on Southwest Airlines?"

As for Chase, it touts 8X points on all Chase Travel purchases, which is up from 5X on flights, but slightly down from 10X on hotels and car rentals. It also touts 4X points on flights and hotels purchased directly with the airline or hotel, up from 3X.

The points system for the card is somewhat complicated (part of why I have always avoided a points-based card), and people's individual situations will vary a lot about whether this card is better or worse or worth it. For some people, the higher yearly fee will net out with all the new rewards; for others, they're thinking of downgrading to a cheaper version or canceling altogether.

I wish all of the Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders the best journey to the path that works best for them. Me, I'm just feeling a huge burden lifted off my shoulders. Ahhhh ….

On the heels of an OpenAI controversy over deleted posts, Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday, accusing the AI company of "intentionally" training AI models on the "personal data of Reddit users"—including their deleted posts—"without ever requesting their consent."

Calling Anthropic two-faced for depicting itself as a "white knight of the AI industry" while allegedly lying about AI scraping, Reddit painted Anthropic as the worst among major AI players. While Anthropic rivals like OpenAI and Google paid Reddit to license data—and, crucially, agreed to "Reddit’s licensing terms that protect Reddit and its users’ interests and privacy" and require AI companies to respect Redditors' deletions—Anthropic wouldn't participate in licensing talks, Reddit alleged.

"Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users’ basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems," Reddit's complaint said.

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