Why CEOs From Google to Klarna are Hooked on Vibe Coding

Coding was once the preserve of the most advanced tech professionals, but today even complete newcomers can do it just as effectively.

Much of that shift is thanks to vibe coding.

This software development approach has a user spell out their desired outcome to an AI tool, which then produces the code from the prompt.

It’s being embraced by developers and senior executives worldwide to streamline their coding needs.

Among them is Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who says “it’s making coding so much more enjoyable”, adding “it’s getting exciting again and the amazing thing is it’s only going to get better now”.

Speaking on a recent Google for Developers podcast interview with Logan Kilpatrick, who runs Google’s AI Studio, Sundar compares the boom in vibe coding to other internet sensations.

“You know suddenly blogs appeared, many more people became writers, if you will, and what YouTube did, many more people became creators,” he says.

From HR professionals to marketing leaders, he says non-technical workers are getting a leg up in being able to visualise ideas directly.

Sundar adds: “In the past, you would have described it. Now, maybe you’re kind of vibe coding it a little bit and showing it to people.”

The development of AI at Google 

Sundar first articulated the “AI-first” vision back in 2016, laying down key investments that have guided the company’s growth and development.

On 18 November, the company unveiled Gemini 3, Google’s latest AI model with new strengths in reasoning, multimodal understanding and action-oriented tasks.

Discussing the release on the podcast, he described the week as the excitement of finally shipping a product the company has been developing “based on a foundation over many many years and of all the deep investments we built”.

He also talked about Nano Banana Pro, Google’s new image generation and editing model built on Gemini 3 Pro. It excels at producing high-quality visuals, with a particular knack for rendering accurate, legible text in multiple languages.

But despite the progress, Sundar questioned whether these software advances are actually improving the world’s productivity “or is it a net progress”.

Looking beyond the current releases of Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro, he also voiced excitement about long-term bets for the next decade, like quantum computing.

He said: “I think in about five years we’ll be having breathless excitement about quantum, hopefully, like we are having with AI today.”

The rise of vibe coding 

The term ‘vibe-coding’ was coined in February by OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy, who introduced the name to capture how AI can let some programmers “forget that the code even exists” and “give in to the vibes” while making a computer programme.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s CEO, said on the Sourcery podcast in September that using AI to programme allows him to create a prototype in 20 minutes.

The CEO of the Swedish fintech firm said he’s been vibe coding for 20 years, but the pace of the work has fundamentally shifted.

What once would have required a meeting with the tech team and then two weeks for them to shape a prototype can now be built straight from his desk.

He said: “Rather than disrupting my poor engineers and product people with what is half good ideas and half bad ideas, now I test it myself.”

The Google CEO also said in an interview with The Verge in September: “The power of the future you’re going to be able to create on the web, we haven’t given that power to developers in 25 years.”