Vibe coding has made it to the C-suite, and tech executives say it is saving them huge amounts of time.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has never been a programmer, but thanks to AI’s rapid development he is now taking the initiative to code his own projects. Vibe coding, which refers to using AI to program using natural language, is helping even non-technical workers spin up ideas.
“Rather than disturbing my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I test it myself,” he recently said on the Sourcery podcast. “I come say, ‘Look, I’ve actually made this work, this is how it works, what do you think, could we do it this way?'”
Siemiatkowski cofounded his buy-now-pay-later platform in 2005, and said for the past 20 years he’s been doing his own version of vibe coding by giving instruction to his engineers and product people and then reviewing the prototype he pitched weeks later.
With tools like Cursor, though, Siemiatkowski said he can bring his ideas to life on his own, before bringing them to the larger team. This way, he said, he can avoid the mixups that used to happen when the team’s prototype didn’t align with his vision.
Instead of waiting weeks for results, Siemiatkowski said he can vibe code a prototype in about 20 minutes. The process is so easy, the Klarna CEO admitted he has gotten a bit obsessed.
“My wife is a bit frustrated with me because like whenever the kids went to bed this summer I was just like ‘Cursor. I got to code,’” he said.
To be sure, some developers have claimed that fixing the mistakes in AI-generated code can be a chore in and of itself. An August report by content delivery platform Fastly found 95% of around 800 software engineers surveyed spend extra time looking over AI-generated code. Some developers have said AI can be helpful for routine tasks and smaller problems but struggles to handle more complex tasks.
On the day of Klarna’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange last week, the company’s stock shot up by 15%. Its stock was up 3.4% as of midday Monday.
Siemiatkowski has recently led Klarna to move beyond its BNPL roots to become more of a traditional bank with moves like a debit card partnership with Visa announced in June. Siemiatkowski has also pushed the company to dig in on AI, even using the technology to create a digital clone of himself that announced Klarna’s first quarter results earlier this year.
Other tech bigwigs like Google CEO Sundar Pichai have also started experimenting with vibe coding using AI tools. Pichai, who has a background in engineering, said in June he had also been experimenting with Cursor and another tool, Replit, to create a webpage.
“It’s exciting to see how casually you can do it now,” Pichai said at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco, according to Business Insider. “Compared to the early days of coding, things have come a long way.”