Why you have to know vibe coding

Hardly any startup can do without a programmer. Especially at the beginning, they represent the core of the company – and the highest costs. That changes now.

A small team, barely ten people, sits in an inconspicuous office in Silicon Valley. It is the team of a highly rated startup, and it has put together with a handful of developers in a few months, which used to have been employed by the army of programmers. This picture not only circle in the Californian tech scene, and follows the concept of “Vibe Coding”.

Garry Tan, head of the legendary startup incubator Y Combinator, is convinced that this “Vibe coding” radically changes the rules of the game for young companies. In an interview with CNBC, Tan recently raved about the new method: With the help of artificial intelligence, small teams could now develop software for which dozens of engineers used to be necessary. In particular, young developers who have problems gaining a foothold in view of a difficult labor market should take this opportunity and set up their own startups.

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“The crazy thing is that today people achieve sales of one to ten million a year with fewer than ten employees.

What exactly does “vibe coding” mean?

According to Tan, this success is partly due to the so -called “Vibe coding”, a new favorite term in Silicon Valley. The expression in February was shaped by Andrej Karpathy, co -founder of Openaai, in a contribution on the platform X (formerly Twitter). But what exactly is this term?

“You simply speak to the large voice models (Large Language Models, LLMS), and these program complete applications,” explained Tan. “If something doesn't work – if there is a bug or you want to make changes or the design should look different – then you no longer have to intervene yourself in the code and write it manually.”

In essence, Tan describes an increasing dependence on artificial intelligence in the actual programming work. The “vibe coding” enormously accelerate the speed at which startups can develop relevant software. “You don't have to set anyone extra for this. “Sometimes you can even take over all proposed changes unseen – these models are now as good.”

AI takes over up to 95 percent of the programming work

According to Tan, “Vibe Coding” makes the entire process of software development more efficient. The current group of startups at Y Combinator-according to TAN, currently consists of around 81 percent of which are currently made up of AI companies-are already using these options intensively. “This happens for the very first time: In about 25 percent of our current startups, 95 percent of the code were written by large voice models,” emphasized Tan.

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The enormous performance of these models allows young companies to stay significantly slimmer than before. What used to have needed 50 to 100 developers can now create a team of only ten people – provided they are real professionals in “Vibe coding”. If you are really good at using the latest tools for codegen, such as cursor or windsurf, you literally do the work of ten or even a hundred engineers on a single day, ”explained Tan.

Limits of “Vibe Coding”: People still have to debug

However, Tan also admitted disadvantages in an episode of the Y-Combinator Podcast LightCone at the beginning of the month. A survey among the current founders showed, for example, that the voice models still have weaknesses in debug. “People still have to take over and understand what exactly the code actually does,” he said. “Apparently there is no way to simply give the model 'debugge that'.”

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Nevertheless, the advantages predominate for Tan. An important point: thanks to AI, it is now significantly more worth investing time and money in niche software-since it can be developed faster and cheaper. “I also believe that this changes the industry as a whole: Suddenly software solutions for areas that one would never have written software in the past can suddenly arise – markets that were previously considered 'too small',” he said. Even such niche markets could now bear companies that achieve sales of a hundred million dollars every year – and still remain small teams. “These are really good news,” says Tan.

New opportunities for young engineers on a difficult job market

For young engineers, according to Tan, the age of “Vibe Coding” comes at the right time: it offers you the opportunity to start your own business regardless of large corporations – especially now that the labor market has become more difficult.

“Perhaps it is exactly the developer who has not received a job at Meta or Google and can now build up its own company – one with ten people and annual turnover of between ten and hundred million dollars,” he said in conclusion. “It's an incredibly exciting moment for software.”

This article first appeared at BI US.