'Vibe Coding' Arrives for Businesses

 

“Creating your own app is now possible with any number of artificial intelligence-based tools, leading to the "vibe coding" revolution for code-writing amateurs.

 

But professional developers are picking it up now, too, bringing the practice -- generally understood as the ability to create functioning apps and websites without strictly editing code -- into businesses.

 

In the next three years, market research and IT consulting firm Gartner predicts that 40% of new software for businesses will be created with techniques involving AI bots translating plain English prompts into usable code.

 

Combined with the growing popularity of AI-powered assistants and editors, vibe coding's rise in enterprise reflects a significant shift in how quickly apps are being conceived and delivered, with many implications for professional developers.

 

The use of AI to write code has steadily increased among companies since the launch of ChatGPT a few years ago.

 

For some large tech companies like Google and Microsoft, AI is already writing over 20% of the code instead of human engineers.

 

Vibe coding can act as a "creative partner" to generate new ideas engineers might not have considered, according to Lauren Wilkinson, Vanguard's divisional chief information officer for financial adviser services.

 

Using AI tools like OpenAI's GPT models and Anthropic's Claude, Wilkinson's team is vibe coding new webpages with the help of product and design staff. The process has eliminated the need for traditional handoffs of work between teams, speeding up the design for a new Vanguard webpage by 40%. Prototyping went from taking two weeks to 20 minutes, she said.

 

The team's roughly 200 engineers are also experimenting with AI-powered code editors like Windsurf and Cursor -- a fast-growing software-as-a-service company.

 

"It's not just transforming the engineering piece, it's really transforming the whole process," Wilkinson said, referring to the practice of vibe coding.

 

But vibe coding, at least in a professional setting, does not rely on vibes, or intuitive feeling, alone.

 

AI tools can be prompted with plain English to create a usable foundation for code, but that code isn't ready for use right away, Wilkinson said.

 

"The role of the engineer is still very, very critical to make sure that the boundaries and conditions are set up front for what the vibe coding is going to produce," she said. "It doesn't excuse the engineer from needing to understand what's going on behind the scenes."

 

Brian Kirkland, CIO of Choice Hotels, said some of the hotel chain's employees, including its engineers, recently taught and took classes on vibe coding. But for vibe coding to really take off, it needs to work inside of a company's existing code base and connect to its other core development systems.

 

Once that framework is built, however, vibe coding works as anticipated, Kirkland said. "It's telling [AI] what you want it to do, seeing if it did it right, and correcting what it did wrong."

 

Some vibe-coding tools specifically designed for non-engineers might be risky in the hands of corporate staff like marketers and salespeople, according to some tech execs.

 

"I've got CIOs who are afraid of an app being constructed by an HR person that's bypassing the security reviews and is going to end up with a privacy issue," said Tariq Shaukat, chief executive of coding company Sonar.

 

And while some CIOs are embracing vibe coding, many others are still catching up to the trend. They're trying to figure out if it's a new form of "shadow IT," or a situation where employees bring their own, unsanctioned apps into corporate technology environments.

 

"A lot of companies I talk to are trying to put in place governance at their audit committee level and things like this, to really make sure it's governed and controlled," Shaukat said.

 

The ever-increasing amount of AI-generated code -- and now the arrival of vibe coding -- is putting pressure on professional software engineers, tech leaders say, forcing them to think about solving business problems rather than just writing code.

 

Jude Schramm, CIO of Fifth Third Bank, said the regional bank's 700 full-time engineers may be entirely vibe coding in a few years' time. Schramm said he's already thinking more about the value of his developers as business problem-solvers rather than as code authors.

 

"Engineering of the future is going to be much more a world of test, quality assurance and validation," Schramm said. "That's what we're trying to train our folks for."” [1]

 

1. 'Vibe Coding' Arrives for Businesses. Lin, Belle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 July 2025: B4.