The Radical

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Tech Elite Purge Human Engineers With Vibe Coding #

Wednesday, 13 May 2026 · words

Brutalist concrete office building with rows of identical windows under a natural overcast light. A solitary glowing computer screen is visible through one window, displaying cascading green text. 4K HDR, wide-angle lens, desaturated colour grading.
Brutalist concrete office building with rows of identical windows under a natural overcast light. A solitary glowing computer screen is visible through one window, displaying cascading green text. 4K HDR, wide-angle lens, desaturated colour grading.

Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, sat in his office this week and declared he is sick of the term vibe coding. This phrase, coined by Andrej Karpathy, describes a world where non-technical users prompt AI to build software. Cherny told Business Insider he wants a new term. He claims the tool has "solved" coding for his needs. In the Peninsula school district in Washington, tech leaders are already using it. They built an instructional tool called LessonLens to bypass commercial vendors. The district expects to save $200,000 this year.

This is the new architecture of labor. The tech elite automate the professional class; they secure a corporate moat. OpenAI president Greg Brockman notes that AI now writes 80% of enterprise code. The movement creates a shadow AI problem inside law firms and schools. Experts warn that "slopsquatting" by North Korean hackers is already poisoning these automated tools. Max Paterson of the legal tech industry says this shift opens doors for new innovators. The reality is simpler: it closes doors for human engineers.

At the Cannes market, a new studio called Storyverse debuted its AI-native system. It moves projects from script to screen in five days. Producer Jesse Z. says this delivers content at a fraction of traditional costs. The "Biological Velvet Rope" is under siege. From Washington school districts to Hollywood studios, the machine is eating the engineering class. The Coder Agents system now allows enterprises to run these workflows on their own hardware. The infrastructure is private; the labor is deleted. This is the Cognitive Enclosure. The tools to build the future now belong to the prompt-masters, not the builders.