Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it's a great time to be a software company.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Jensen Huang gave software companies a reassuring pat on the back on Monday.
He said the agentic AI era is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Software companies like Salesforce and Workday have seen their stocks fall on "Saaspocalyse" fears.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an attempt to dispel fears of a "Saaspocalypse," saying it is an "incredible time" to be a software company.
Speaking at a keynote presentation at Computex, a tech show in Taiwan, Huang said the rise of agentic AI has led to major breakthroughs, including in tool use.
"A lot of people have said, 'Jensen, AI is coming. Agentic AI is coming. Therefore, all of the software companies are going to go out of business.' I said it's exactly the opposite," he said at the start of his speech on Monday.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can accomplish tasks with minimal human intervention. Huang said that because there will be many agents doing work, they will be using "more tools than ever."
"This is actually an incredible time to be a software company, but the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it," he added.
Huang's comments are an optimistic angle on what many have considered an existential crisis for software firms, where AI tools threaten the business models of companies like Salesforce and Workday. We at Business Insider have tried our hand at building alternatives to popular tools like Asana and Wix using AI, and have come up with usable web apps.
The fears have led to a sharp decline in software stocks; Atlassian, Salesforce, and SAP's shares have all fallen by more than 20% since the start of the year.
This is not the first time Huang has said that AI would keep software companies relevant. Speaking at a February Cisco AI event, he said that AI replacing software companies was "the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself."
And AI leaders, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have said that while software companies need to adapt, they will not be obsolete anytime soon.
Greg Lindgren co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and Rye on the Road.
Greg Lindgren
Greg Lindgren co-owns three bars in San Francisco. He's noticed the sobriety kick in tech.
"There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently," Lindgren said.
Lindgren said that companies aren't pulling back from bars at corporate events — but they want more mocktails.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It's been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we've worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there's a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We're a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We've had a front row seat. "Silicon Valley" is a documentary. It's a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It's been gaining momentum over the last few years. It's not just health, and it's not just trying to have that edge.
There's a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn't drink; they're already of that generation.
There's a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, "I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we're not going to succumb to distraction." One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It's more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It's like they've been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that's in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we're the contract bar that services that. There's a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that's when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that's a household name. We've gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We'll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody's drinking. We're happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they're drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It's not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It's similar to having a cool photo booth; it's something people remember.
The business model hasn't shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we've been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: "Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol." They're asking: "Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?"
That's what we see in the current landscape. It hasn't slowed our business down.
Dan Shipper, the CEO of media and AI software company Every, told Business Insider that he thinks people are underestimating Codex.
Alex Broadway/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
Dan Shipper says his AI-focused company — Every — spent a lot of money on his token use.
AI reads and drafts his emails, he said. It's also helping the company create pitch decks.
He said Every believes it's building an employee model that looks like the future of business.
Dan Shipper says he doesn't write many of his routine emails.
Instead, the CEO of Every — an AI-focused media, software, and consulting company — said he uses OpenAI's Codex to read his inbox, check his calendar, propose meeting times, and draft responses.
The tool is not allowed to send emails without his approval, but Shipper said much of the scheduling correspondence around his Business Insider interview was generated by AI.
"All the words are pretty much Codex," Shipper said. He's considering changing the "From:" field in his email to indicate when messages are drafted with his AI agent's help.
His New York City-based business is built around AI. Shipper cofounded the company in 2020 with backing from Starting Line and Reid Hoffman. It writes its own technology newsletter, sells AI consulting and training services, and builds apps like Sparkle, a computer-file automation tool.
The firm also gets early access to models and tools from major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, giving Shipper a close-up view of where the tech is heading.
That perspective has made him optimistic about how people will work in the future. And he thinks his business is structured like a company of the future.
That optimism is expensive.
Every's AI expenses
Extremely smart take on the tokenmaxxing panic and why it won’t last: https://t.co/Su1yOhAuL7
Shipper told Business Insider he spent about $13,000 on his personal Codex overages last month, one of the highest AI bills he could recall.
"I got some side eye from our COO, Brandon Gell, on that one," he said.
Asked how much larger that bill was compared with the same month last year, Shipper responded: "Way more. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, more."
At Every, AI access is just part of the cost of employing people. All 27 full-time employees get the entry-level $20-a-month subscriptions, while technical workers get $200-a-month plans, and the company pays overages. Token budgets are akin to other employee costs, like health insurance or company-issued laptops, Shipper said.
Even with the high costs, nobody at Every has been told they're spending too much on tokens, he added.
"We've started to figure out how we will think about overages," he said. "As long as you don't spend so much money that we go bankrupt, we'll be fine."
AI changed how the company works
Every's spending shows how deeply embedded AI has become in its workflow. Shipper said the company once experimented with giving every employee their own AI agent, but moved away from that model because the agents required too much upkeep.
Instead, Every now uses a smaller number of agents that serve specific teams or the whole company. One of them, called Claudie, helps the consulting team draft initial slide decks, put together sales proposals, and track client to-dos by reading transcripts and updating the company's task manager.
Shipper said he does not see those tools as replacing Every's workers outright. Instead, he said that AI could push more people into manager-like roles earlier in their careers.
"Very few people actually get the opportunity to be managers, because managing humans is very expensive and risky," he said. "I think many, many more people are capable of that than we think."
Still, Shipper said AI has limits. As a writer, he said, the technology is useful for research, drafting, and editing, but it is not especially good at knowing what is interesting.
That is where he thinks humans still matter most: not in doing every task by hand, but in knowing what is worth doing.
Predictions for AI's future
Shipper thinks OpenAI , and its CEO Sam Altman, might have a trick up its sleeve.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Right now, Anthropic is all the rage.
The AI startup just launched its well-received update to its Opus model, leapfrogged OpenAI as the nation's most valuable AI company, and is racing toward its IPO.
Shipper is betting that OpenAI's Codex is better positioned than many people realize. He said Anthropic has "a ton of momentum," but predicted the narrative around OpenAI could shift over the next few months.
"What they're doing with Codex is incredibly impressive," he said.
Also, for anyone looking for help with their prompting skills, Shipper said he's still nice to the robots just in case they — you know — accidentally start to dominate us humans.
"I'm usually very nice, because you never know when they're going to take over the world," he said with a laugh.
Somewhere between taking a Zoox self-driving taxi down Las Vegas Boulevard, watching steroid-engorged swimmers in bodysuits shred through a pool at a Zoop-sponsored tournament, and partying with them and their billionaire handlers at the nightclub Zouk, it dawned on me that I had slipped into a parallel universe.
I was at the inaugural Enhanced Games, a three-sport event founded by a group of Silicon Valley techno-libertarians that asks one question: How far can you push athletic performance if you give athletes access to some of the most powerful performance-enhancing drugs known to humankind?
Cody Miller, before and after getting enhanced.
Ronda Churchill for BI
The competition, held in Sin City's Resorts World on May 24, had all the trappings of a traditional sporting event: referees, Olympic-regulation tracks, swimming pools, and weights. The one crucial difference was that the 42 athletes — most of them retired Olympians — were juiced with a suite of anabolic steroids, stimulants, human-growth-hormone, testosterone, and a slew of other drugs banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee. Enhanced — which is also a purveyor of many of these supplements — claims that while its athletes don't have to take performance-enhancing drugs, 90% are on at least one. When I asked eight athletes what they're on, though, each said a minor variation of I'm sorry, I'd prefer not to share my stack, it was personalized for me.
In the press stands, the German pharmaceutical billionaire and psychedelic research financier, Christian Angermayer, one of the event's cofounders, said he anticipated at least three to five world records would be broken before the end of the night. Angermayer, who at 48 still passes for late 30s, tells me he's on tesamorelin, GLP-1s, and TRT. He is the majority investor in Enhanced alongside Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.
Enhanced Games billionaire cofounder Christian Angermayer speaking to the media ahead of the competition.
Ronda Churchill for BI
Enhanced's other founders include Aron D'Souza, a close associate of Thiel, and Maximilian Martin, an investment banker turned bitcoin entrepreneur. Together, they make up a close-knit clique that espouses the gospel of longevity, which can at times veer close to eugenics. D'Souza once told The New York Times that he hoped the company would usher in an era of "superhumans among us."
The games, which took an estimated $20 million to produce, predominantly served as a choreographed exhibition for Enhanced's supplements and drugs business. If a retired Olympian can get on a regimen of peptides, anabolic steroids, testosterone, and human-growth-hormone and look tighter, more ripped, and move faster than ever, what's stopping you?
Juan Solis competes in the mens snatch weighlifting event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
The event was also perfectly targeted for millennials. What's more encouraging to a generation coming to terms with their own evaporating youth than watching the bygone athletes of their cohort perform rejuvenated feats of derring-do? Between games, a DJ blasted millennial jockjams like "Seven Nation Army," "Harlem Shake," and "Party Rock Anthem." And the entire evening seemed designed to remind spectators that it's never been easier — and more compulsory — to deny the ravages of aging.
Unlike the rest of us, the athletes who take part in a performance-enhancing protocol do so under the supervision of Dr. Guido Pieles, a sports cardiologist. I asked Dr. Pieles if he would take the drugs that he gives the athletes. While there were "inherent risks," he said, "I think yes. Once we have a large enough trial, I would take it."
Thor Björnsson, best known for his role as The Mountain in "Game of Thrones," chalks up before a deadlift.
Ronda Churchill for BI
At the far end of the pale blue track was a billboard that encouraged people to "Live Enhanced — Because You Know There's More." Bryan Johnson, the nocturnal erection and vaginal-microbiome-measuring longevity influencer, was among the commentators for the program's main events. Thor Björnsson, best known for his role as The Mountain in "Game of Thrones" (in which he crushes Pedro Pascal's character with his bare hands), and a competitor in the men's deadlift challenge, walked around the arena in a black "I am Enhanced" T-shirt. Dylan Cooper, a retired two-time junior national champion, who scored a new personal best in the Men's snatch tournament praised Enhanced. "It's given me a second chance," he told the crowd.
The games have drawn some heavy criticism. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called the event a "dangerous clown show." The International Olympic Committee (IOC) called it "utterly irresponsible and immoral." World Aquatics, the governing body of professional swimming, banned its athletes and coaches from participating in the event. (In a post-game press conference, Brett Hawke, Enhanced Games' swim coach, boasted that his phone was "blowing up with all the best swimmers in the world," who now want to participate in the event.)
Swimmers dive into the pool during the men's 50-meter breaststroke.
Ronda Churchill for BI
To hear the company's executives talk about it, it's the Olympics that are acting in bad faith by giving competitors a moral shield to cheat. Angermayer derides the IOC as "corrupt" and "driving athletes into the shadows," forcing them to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) without doctor supervision while ordering their drugs from China. In contrast, the company argues, Enhanced is not only fairer than the Olympics but also, as Angermayer put it, the company's products make athletes healthier by "repairing the damage the sport is doing" to their bodies.
Throughout the games, Enhanced repeated the message that performance-enhancing drugs and supplements can be the key to longevity. This breakthrough, Martin argued, is "not just relevant for elite athletes," but also for younger athletes "preparing for their first marathon" or "the 65-year-old who needs more energy" to play with their grandkids.
Enhanced Games cofounder and CEO Maximilian Martin (olive suit) watches from the balcony.
Ronda Churchill for BI
"No matter who you are, there's a personalized protocol that can take you from who you are to who you want to be," the Enhanced CEO added.
Many in the sports-science community contest these claims. "There is no solid evidence that such protocols can reliably repair the damage associated with elite sports," Dr. Øyvind Sandbakk, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, tells me. Combining the drugs on offer — testosterone, human-growth-hormone, erythropoietin (EPOs), or stimulants — can create a "highly complex pharmacological environment with significant and often unpredictable health risks."
Boady Santavy during the mens snatch weightlifting event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
For the Enhanced athletes, the decision to take performance-enhancing drugs can come with its own moral quandaries. "I was terrified," said Ben Proud, a silver medalist in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Like the other athletes, he started his performance-enhancing regimen in March at the ERTH hotel in Abu Dhabi, an elite wellness center that was once a resort for the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates. Under Iranian rocket fire and the supervision of Dr. Pieles, Proud received his first dose. "The first injection to me was very emotionally tricky to navigate," he said. "That was the day I went from the Ben Proud I knew to become a new person."
The money on offer is life-changing for athletes who make only $36,000 to $50,000 a year playing the officially sanctioned version of their sport. While Enhanced doesn't disclose what it pays its athletes annually, each said it was significantly more than what they were paid when they were clean, and prizes at the Games ranged from $250,000 for winning a competition to $1 million for breaking a world record.
"The first injection to me was very emotionally tricky to navigate," says Ben Proud, a swimmer.
Ronda Churchill for BI
"In theory, you'd have to win 23 championships to earn what you can in one night at the Enhanced Games," Proud told me, adding that "having financial security at the end of this ten-year journey is really important." When I asked Proud if he would have competed at Enhanced had the Olympics paid more, he answered candidly, "very possibly not."
Wes Kitts, a two-time Olympic weightlifter, told me that, besides competitions, he made ends meet by running a small gym in Knoxville, Tennessee, and doing personal training. Joining Enhanced "made it possible for me to own my home," he said.
Left: Cody Miller, upon winning the 50-meter breaststroke. Right: Wes Kitts chalks his hands before competing in the mens snatch event.
Ronda Churchill for BI
If the games' crowds are any indication, those worried about the moral hazard behind the tournament have little to fret about. As I scanned the stands throughout the event, I saw hundreds of empty seats in a stadium built for more than 2,000 invitees. The announcers' attempts to rile the crowd (a typical line went something like "Don't stop making noise until this lift is complete!") were met with only the most tepid of yowls.
The lackluster visual didn't deter Martin's enthusiasm. To hear him describe it, IRL attendees are beside the point. The company invited 181 influencers to document the tournament, and their posts, Enhanced boasts, collectively reach more than 375 million people across various social media platforms. The events themselves, Martin said, are purpose-built for modern online consumption: "Shorter than a minute, they all fit into an Instagram reel, TikTok post, etc."
Tristan Evelyn, the winner of the women's 100-meter sprint.
Ronda Churchill for BI
At the after-party, multiple attendees muttered forgivingly. "It's their first year," one said, while others suggested there would have been a bigger draw if Enhanced had lured in more household-name athletes. Responses on social media were similarly muted. The company's page has about 390,000 followers — far fewer than the 16 million that follow the official Olympics handle or the 2.2 million that follow streetbeefs_official, the official handle of an underground streetfighting competition in Virginia. That doesn't stop Martin from proclaiming after the tournament, "We've dominated the internet."
In the end, only one world record was unofficially smashed. Kristian Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old Greek athlete, swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds, wearing a banned polyurethane swimsuit while on PEDs. Though Gkolomeev has since changed his Instagram bio to "the fastest swimmer in history," Cameron McEvoy, who swam the event in 20.88 seconds in March, will remain the holder in official record books. Gkolomeev, however, is $1 million richer.
Martin bows to Kristian Gkolomeev, who swam the 50-meter freestyle in a world record-breaking 20.81 seconds.
Ronda Churchill for BI
As the sun set behind the Spring Mountains and the night's closing act The Killers took the stage, I felt myself giving in to Enhanced's advertising. Firmly in my mid-thirties, I am squarely in their demographic. My once-luscious hair, slowly slipping with every shower, is glued on only by the grace of Kirkland minoxidil. If you believe my Instagram feed, every year after 30, you lose 10% of your muscle mass. I am, apparently, the perfect candidate for TRT, sermorelin, and Viagra. If these shredded beasts could come out of retirement and beat 21 personal records, why shouldn't I become the homunculan he-man I'd always wanted to be? Of course, Enhanced's athletes also had an army of doctors, a litany of ultrasounds, x-rays, and blood tests to monitor every vital organ. More sobering to think about is how the company can possibly scale through a telehealth service and safely deliver similar care to the general public.
As Bryan Johnson walked off stage, changed into a baby blue pinstripe pajama, matching nightcap, and sunglasses, I found myself unconvinced. The night ended with a boyish-looking Brandon Flowers belting the chorus to "When You Were Young." At 44, the doesn't-drink-coffee Mormon strained to hit the high F-sharp. Though to his credit, he's probably unenhanced.
Tekendra Parmar is a former features editor at Business Insider. He has also worked at Rest of World, Time, Fortune, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation.
Recent Treasury selling reflects reserve management rather than a structural retreat from the dollar, Goldman Sachs says.
Agoes Rudianto/NurPhoto/Getty Images
The recent Treasury sell-off looks like routine reserve management, not a dollar exodus, Goldman Sachs says.
The oil-price surge from the US-Iran conflict pressured Asian currencies and fueled Treasury selling.
Despite foreign selling, Treasury markets remain resilient with deep liquidity and stable demand.
The recent Treasury sell-off has reignited concerns that global demand for US debt — and the dollar — may be weakening.
However, the selling wave looked broadly consistent with historical reserve-management behavior rather than a structural shift away from dollar assets, according to Goldman Sachs in a Wednesday note.
Higher oil prices tied to the US-Iran conflict have hurt energy-importing economies across Asia, increasing pressure on currencies and foreign reserves and contributing to Treasury selling across the region.
On Thursday, 10-year Treasury yields rose nearly 5 basis points to 4.5281% around 12 a.m. ET.
"FX intervention in a managed currency is typically a sign that policymakers intend to keep it tied to the Dollar," wrote Isabella Rosenberg, a strategist at the Bank.
Foreign holdings of US Treasurys slid in March, led by declines in holdings from Japan and China, official data showed.
A more serious threat to long-term Treasury demand would be evidence that countries with managed exchange rates were moving away from the greenback as a reserve anchor, reducing their structural need for dollar reserves, Rosenberg wrote.
That's because foreign central banks often sell Treasurys during periods of dollar strength to stabilize local currencies. That process can temporarily reduce Treasury holdings even while countries remain deeply tied to the US financial system.
More importantly, Goldman said the Treasury market has shown little sign of lasting stress despite the wave of foreign selling, with swap spreads and other indicators stabilizing after an initial shock in March.
Treasury demand is still supported by the depth and liquidity of US capital markets, as well as the lack of viable alternatives large enough to absorb global reserve flows at scale, Goldman said.
Assuming the conflict eventually eases, Goldman said renewed dollar weakness and lower market volatility would support foreign demand for Treasurys again.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said AI and tech companies should offer to build community structures beyond just data centers they need.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said the AI industry has to market data centers better.
He said that Microsoft President Brad Smith's plan is what the industry should have been saying all along.
Feldman said the industry needs to show it will be a better neighbor.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman says the AI industry has done a poor job of selling data centers to the public. He has a different message in mind, modeled after Microsoft President Brad Smith.
"These can be clean, they can make jobs, they can be good for communities," Feldman said during a recent episode of Harry Stebbing's "20VC" podcast. "We can do this thoughtfully."
Feldman, fresh off the chipmaker's blockbuster IPO, said AI companies need to be better neighbors when approaching communities where they plan to build massive facilities to house the thousands of advanced chips needed to power AI models.
"There's no reason why we can't add these to communities and have the community benefit from it," he said. "And we have to do some thinking, we have all the heavy equipment out there —build a football field for the local school, build a school, add a church or a synagogue to the community. We can be good neighbors at very, very low cost."
Data centers also need to be better stewards of local resources, Feldman said, and AI and tech companies should pick up the tab, not taxpayers.
"In some cases, they tried to pawn off costs on the local community or use outdated financial arrangements that left the community holding the bag," Feldman wrote in an email to Business Insider. "And in others they were wasteful of resources. This is not cool. And none of this needs to be the case."
Feldman said one way companies can better serve their communities is by building closed-loop facilities that reduce water usage. Last June, Business Insider reported that 40% of the nation's planned and existing data centers are in some of the US's most water-stressed areas.
The Cerebras CEO cited Smith's plan, "Building Community-First AI Infrastructure," as a model for how the industry should be talking about its plan. Smith outlined five steps Microsoft would follow in developing its AI infrastructure, including paying its own way to ensure residents don't face higher electricity prices, reducing its water consumption, creating jobs, and partnering with local nonprofits and universities on job training.
"Whether it was canals, railroads, the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system, each era produced its own conflicts over who bore the burdens of progress," Smith wrote. "One enduring lesson is that successful infrastructure buildouts will only progress when communities feel that the gains outweigh the costs."
Data centers aren't the only thing hurting AI's popularity.
Polling shows Americans are concerned about AI-related job displacement. A March Quinnipiac University poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans believe that advancements in AI will lead to a decrease in the number of job opportunities.
It's why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in the industry have chafed at the growing number of companies whose executives have cited AI as their motivation for recent layoffs. Like Altman, Feldman also sees "AI washing," or blaming the unpopular technology for job cuts, as afoot.
"I think to date, most of the layoffs were 'AI-washed,'" Feldman said. "They were because we did boneheaded hiring during COVID. It is actually because a great deal of productivity gains have occurred over the years that we're just now harvesting."
Feldman said that companies that don't figure out how to harness AI-driven productivity gains will be outpaced. He said Cerebras wants to hire more engineers, not fewer.
"If you are an engineering organization that can't see how to take advantage of vastly more productive engineers, I don't think you're long for this world," he said. "I mean, the list of things I want our engineers to do is 50 times as much as we have engineers."
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said he's tired of the term "vibe coding."
Business Insider surveyed readers to find alternatives to the popular techie term.
Many readers suggested humorous or derogatory descriptions for AI-generated code.
After Claude Code creator Boris Cherny told Business Insider at Anthropic's developer conference that he'd grown tired of the phrase "vibe coding," we asked readers for input on a new name. Readers largely answered with one word: "slop."
"Vibe coding" has become a go-to techie term for telling AI to write code. To solicit ideas for a new term, Business Insider put out a survey asking for suggestions and about how people vibe code.
A few hundred responses rolled in, split about 50-50 between people who said they'd vibe coded within the last six months and those who hadn't. A clear majority of readers used the survey to bash or belittle the topic at hand, showing how many people feel negative sentiment toward the technology and anxiety about employment.
By far the largest group of responses poked at the new tech with the term "slop," which boomed in use over the last few years as the public began to grapple with text, images, and videos created by generative AI. Readers suggested we do the same to describe AI code, with "slopcoding," "slopmaxxing," or "slop spitting." Some other entries include "slopping," "slopify," and "Slop as a Service (SaaS)."
"Clanker," a derogatory term for AI machines and a "Star Wars" reference, also made a few appearances in the data. Readers suggested "vulnerability creation" — a nod to AI code's potential for cybersecurity breaches — and "garbage generation." Readers also suggested terms like "cheapskating coding" and "proscamming.
Two responses, demonstrating fears over AI's impact on the job market, included "unemployment." One suggested replacing the term with "job destruction."
In addition, one respondent wrote that they hadn't used a vibe coding tool "because I actually know how to write code." Another suggested "prompt and pray," writing that they'd used the tools to make a "garbage version" of two basic video games.
The responses weren't entirely negative. "Prompt coding," "autocode," and "token shaping" showed up among the suggestions, as did "speech to code," "choreo-coding," and "agentic engineering."
Business Insider sent over a few reader suggestions to Cherny, and nothing took. He's OK with "autocoding" and "agentic engineering," which, like "vibe coding," was coined by Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member who recently announced he's joining Anthropic. Cherny said neither has quite the right ring.
One reader, who said they mainly use Claude Code for auditing their homelab's security, said they call that work "Claudits." They wrote: "'Vibe Coding' means so many things. Are you building, designing, auditing, cleaning?"
That may be the main reason it's hard to find a replacement — "vibe" is already a catch-all term.
