Collaborative Vibes
Through AI nerd influencer Andrej Karpathy, the term "vibe coding" has made a splash. The gist: "the LLMs are getting too good. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works". That's a big, warm hug for AI from an industry luminary.
I see that happening, too. I had a request the other day to help someone whip up a quick Python tool to handle a weird one-off scenario. I prepared my prompt, smashed it through Claude with extended thinking, did a follow-up after something didn't go how I wanted, et voilà! The thing worked. I shipped it off to my colleague, they used it for a few days, and it's now gathering dust on a hard drive somewhere.
But there's a distinction. I just started working at Nova AI, where we're building agents to create enterprise (SAP) applications. Nothing will convince you that there is still a world outside of vibe coding like working with enterprise applications. There are extra technical pieces: a stunning amount of custom tooling you need to provide the AI, showing the AI the right stuff at the right time, and working your way around context limits. There's extra knowledge work: LLMs know less about SAP than about popular Python libraries, so you better up your prompting game and find, test, and patch up those holes. There is SO MUCH stuff to do in enterprise applications that it kinda boggles the mind. A demo of autonomous agents building SAP apps will knock your socks off - but so will the tooling that's been developed to support such a demo. Claude, with only its turbo-AI wits, just can't go the whole way. (Yet.)
In the future, collaborative vibes are how I see this working. I imagine an awesome Zoom call where 4 humans and an AI monkey around in real time on a new enterprise application. The humans bounce ideas off each other and fill in context gaps on business needs, and the AI continually revises an application while asking clarifying questions along the way. It'll be fast enough that the meatbags can vibe along with the AI, together. Until Claude can memorize your entire business and dream up new things by itself. PM
