What's the vibe of vibe coding?

In the past few weeks, a new social platform has been making waves on the internet. It’s called Moltbook, but it’s not for people. It's for AI agents, so they can chat amongst themselves.

But the platform was built using a method called “vibe coding,” where AI actually creates the code with no manual input from the human in charge.

For more on this strange new world, “Marketplace Morning Report” host, Sabri-Ben Achour, spoke with Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So Steph, Moltbook was — is — a fun, possible glimpse into humanity's destruction. But also, it was what is called “vibe coded.” What does vibe coded mean?

Stephanie Hughes: Yeah, so this is the term for when a person doesn't do the coding to create an application or website, an AI does. And it means that you can whip up an app or a site really, really quickly, but you might not really understand how it works.

Ben-Achour: So that, though, in the case of Moltbook, created some security issues, right? Can you explain that?

Hughes: Yeah, it did. So, the cloud security company Wiz did a review of Moltbook shortly after it came online, and they found they were able to access sensitive information on the platform, a lot of the internal workings. And Wiz told me, when they let Moltbook know about the problems, they did get them fixed. But I talked to Ami Luttwak — he's Wiz’s chief technology officer — and he said this is a good example of the kinds of issues that can come up when a site or an app is vibe coded.

Ami Luttwak: So, the app always looks very professional. Behind the scenes, actually, it's just one person that vibe coded it. Is that great? Yes, but maybe we should say this site was vibe coded. Be careful!

Hughes: Moltbook does do this. It says “built for agents, by agents” on the site's home page. But not all vibe-coded sites do, and people might not even understand the implications of it.

Ben-Achour: How hard is it to vibe code something?

Hughes: It is remarkably easy. I went to one of the platforms that lets you use AI to build stuff, and I want my seven-year-old to learn how to type. So, I asked the AI to create a game that my son, Will, could play. And in like, four minutes, it ginned up this game where letters fell from the sky and it was really colorful, and the player has to press the right letter on the keyboard to catch them. And I tried it out with my son, and the cool thing is, you can actually change the game as you're playing it.

Will: Ask it to be slower.

Hughes: I asked the AI to slow down the speed the letters were coming down. And it worked.

Ben-Achour: Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, how disruptive could vibe coding be, in tech? It sounds like very.

Hughes: It could be a really big deal. There are actually new companies cropping up that advise people and companies how to vibe code. One of them is called Giga Catalyst, and I talked to its CEO, Namanyay Goel.

Namanyay Goel: One of my customers is a mechanic. He built an app, and now he's managing all of his technicians, his mechanics and the orders that are coming in with his own vibe coded app.

Hughes: Goel says it's just way faster and cheaper to spin up apps and websites by vibe coding them than paying a coder to do it. But he says people and companies need to really think through whether they want to give an AI sensitive information.

Ben-Achour: Stephanie Hughes, thank you so much.

Hughes: Yep! It's a little bit like that line from one of the Harry Potter books. “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”