OpenAI chair Bret Taylor: Vibe coding will stay, but AI agents will reshape software

OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said on the "Big Technology Podcast" Wednesday that vibe coding — using AI and natural-language prompts to build software quickly — will stick around, but it isn’t the biggest shift coming to tech. Taylor said vibe coding will soon feel normal rather than novel, but focusing on how fast you can "vibe code" existing apps misses a larger change.

"Everyone's looking at all the software use and saying, 'How fast could I vibe code that?'" he said. "I wonder if it's the wrong question." He argued the real disruption will be structural: the software we use today — dashboards, web forms and traditional apps — will be replaced by AI agents.

Taylor called agents "the future of software," saying, "We will delegate tasks to agents that will operate against a database." He added, "Who's making those agents is the question." Taylor also warned that while AI has cut the cost of building software, it hasn’t solved harder problems like maintenance or the risk of getting things wrong.

"That's why most people would prefer to buy a solution off the shelf," he said, noting the appeal of amortizing maintenance costs across many clients. The article also flagged limits of vibe coding.

bret taylor, openai chair bret taylor, vibe coding, limits of vibe coding, ai agents, future of software, agents operate against a database, buy agents off the shelf, build agents yourself, amortize maintenance costs, cost of building software, risk of getting things wrong, dashboards and web forms, traditional apps, big technology podcast, sundar pichai, google, ai generated code, alphabet earnings call, boris cherny, claude code, peterman podcast, prototypes and throwaway code, maintainable code, security in codebases