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Even non-software engineers can now make apps thanks to generative artificial intelligence tools. We'll tell you how to code with just vibes. Plus, the CEO of General Motors says the company is all in on the future of electric vehicles, despite lobbying Congress to repeal California's emissions rules. We'll hear her interview from the WSJ's Future of Everything event.
But first, if you've ever wanted to make an app but didn't have the technical chops to do so, you may not need them anymore. Thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT and Anthropix Cloud or lesser-known ones like Cursor, just about anybody can code up an app. And that's exactly what some folks have been doing through a process that's been dubbed vibe coding.
My colleague, Victoria Craig, spoke with San Francisco-based writer and technologist Jasmine Sun about it. For people who have never heard this before, what is vibe coding? Vibe coding is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who led AI at Tesla and was on the founding team at OpenAI. And vibe
Vibe coding is basically an approach where you're coding in plain English. So normally, if you're not a coder, you don't know the coding languages, all of the fancy syntax. It almost feels like a foreign language. But with vibe coding, because of AI, you can just give an AI instructions of what to build in English. For example, create a website to display all of my favorite music albums in a gallery format. And AI will just do all the hard work and make the website for you
And you've got some really interesting examples of how people have really harnessed this technology to do all this.
all kinds of tasks, like entertain babies even. Just walk us through some of those examples that you have in your story. I got the idea to report this piece because I made my own website for the first time. I'm not a coder. And I was like, oh my God, this actually was pretty easy. I did it in like an afternoon. So a lot of the examples of the personal apps and the games that people were making were actually parents building stuff for their kids. For example, one of the folks I interviewed, Michael Keating, an e-bike founder in San Francisco, he
his son loves to play 20 questions with him, plays with him nonstop, asking, answering until like everyone in the family is worn out and sick of it. And so he was like, you know what? Let me build an AI that will play 20 questions with him. And he used the app Replit
which is like a $25 a month subscription, doesn't require any coding skills to build AI 20 questions for his son. And it can play the asker, it can play the guesser, and his son just plays with that now. Or Irina and Priya, two moms who are friends and live in New York,
created BabyTime, which is a version of FaceTime that shows pictures instead of names and all the pictures are of their family members. Irina's son, for example, can just tap a picture of a family member and it'll instantly initiate a FaceTime call to them. One thing that Irina told me that really stuck with me is she was saying that a lot of the apps that you download from the app store, they're full of pop-up ads or in-app purchases or all this distracting stuff. And like her toddler's three, she really doesn't want him to be
accidentally clicking on something or just in a digital space that's not designed for kids. And so for her, vibe coding is an opportunity to create a digital environment that she knows is safe and introduces the opportunities that she wants for her child. It basically levels the playing field so all of us can become our own software engineers. But what happens to the people who have actually gone to school and studied all of this to become professional software engineers and coders?
Are there jobs at risk because of platforms like this? It's a big question. And it's one that a lot of economists and folks are trying to study, like what is the impact of AI on the junior software engineer labor market? What I will say is that from the software engineers who I spoke with,
Several of them told me that they view vibe coding and software engineering as two different fields. So when you are trying to build an app that millions of people can use stably, securely, that's resistant to hacks and cyber attacks, that requires a lot more careful testing and infrastructure.
Whereas vibe coding, at least at the current level, is much more suited to these like personal use cases where you're not worried that someone's going to hack into your 20 questions account, for example. And so at the moment, professional software engineers are still making high level decisions about security, about scaling, how to make something resilient to really big use cases. But at least for small toy apps...
Vibe coding is a great solution. That was the WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with Jasmine Sun, a technologist and writer at jasmine.news based in San Francisco. Coming up, GM was going to convert a gas engine plant to make EV motors and then scrap the plan. But CEO Mary Barra says she still sees a path to all EVs. We'll hear from her after the break.
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General Motors is a top automaker in the U.S. It's also one of the biggest sellers of EVs. But recently, it's walked back its investments in the space and pushed to nullify California's mandate banning gas-powered cars by 2035. GM CEO Mary Barra sat down last week with The Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief Emma Tucker at this year's Future of Everything. They discussed GM's evolving EV strategy as well as broader challenges the industry is facing.
Here are highlights from their conversation. Mary, you are CEO of one of America's most iconic, famous automakers. I want to turn to some news because we had a news announcement from you that GM is going to keep making V8 engines at a plant in New York, which you had planned to convert to EV motors. Should we take this as a sign that the future, at least in the U.S., is actually gas-powered and not electric?
Well, we still believe in an all-EV future. I think EVs are fundamentally better. We have work to do to continue to get battery technology to give us greater density so we have farther range. We need to have a robust charging infrastructure. But having a next-gen V8 engine was always part of our plan because this next engine will give the consumer more performance.
as well as more fuel efficiency. It's almost $900 million, the largest investment we've ever made in an engine plant. So do you still see that all-electric future? And when do you think the U.S. might eventually get there? I think depending on what happens with the regulatory environment. And also I think what's actually more important is getting a robust charging infrastructure, as I mentioned, because I do believe the consumer is very rational. When you think about buying a new vehicle, a car, a truck, or a crossover vehicle,
For most people, it's the most important or the second most important and expensive purchase that they make. So consumers are incredibly rational and they need to make sure that vehicle is going to take care of their whole life. So I see a path to all EV. It will depend on how much we get the infrastructure ready. But I do believe we'll get there because I think the vehicles are better. Well, what is GM's role in helping to create that infrastructure? I mean, you've made a lot of profits since 2023. Why hasn't any of that been plowed into building the kind of infrastructure
charging infrastructure that everyone says is necessary for EVs to really get off the ground? Well, it actually has. We're working with Pilot Flying J to get chargers on the interstates. We worked with Tesla and we now have access to their charging infrastructure. And we've worked with our dealers because our dealers know the local community and know where best to place the charging infrastructure. So we've been investing quite a bit, but I think we've got to get a little further. And I believe we will. I think every quarter, the infrastructure gets a little better.
So I think everyone would agree that you're operating against a backdrop of a very challenging backdrop. But nevertheless, there is a perception out there that GM has been flip-flopping on EVs and in particular on emissions regulations. So we reported that GM pushed for Congress to
to repeal California's emissions rules. And these are rules that you did want support. How can you be committed to the EV transition while also opposing the most stringent rules pushing the industry in that direction? Well, what we're committed to is the customer. And the customer was telling us they weren't ready. I mean, the regulatory environment from a California perspective and the states that followed it was requiring that
EV penetration be at 37% for new car sales. Last month, it was around 7%.
And about 35% of the vehicles sold are in the states that were following that. So the regulatory environment was getting in front of the customer. And I've always said we needed one national standard because that's going to allow the car companies to develop technology more efficiently and more effectively. On top of that, the House has also voted to end tax credits for EVs, which did make them more affordable.
When do you now think customers can expect price parity between gas and EVs? We are working to improve our EV profitability every single day, and we have vehicles out there right now that are affordable. So right now in the marketplace today, a consumer can get a vehicle that's at parity or very close when you take the cost of the ownership experience, price of gas, et cetera. Consumers can do that today. Automakers in China are churning out
tech-rich EVs at incredibly low cost. And they're developing new models at breakneck speed. So it looks as though the future of your industry appears to have shifted to China.
How did they manage to put ahead so quickly on EVs? I think it's well understood that the auto industry in China is heavily subsidized and they have excess capacity that they're then shipping to other countries around the world and again being subsidized. So I think when we look at that, we need to make sure that we can compete. I mean, we've looked at the vehicles, torn them down, and we understand there's not like a tech
technological advantage per se, but when you have a business being subsidized heavily, it's going to be harder to compete price-wise. So obviously this is a future of everything conference here. So I have to ask you, how are you harnessing the power of AI to change your manufacturing processes?
Absolutely, we are. We just a couple weeks ago, maybe it was a month ago now, we made an announcement with NVIDIA and there's several different projects we have going on in the manufacturing space as well as the product development space. But one specific is using digital twins. So your factory's running before there's any piece of machinery on the plant floor that allows it to start up much more efficiently, takes cost and time out of the entire process. Like I said, we've got
projects going where we're giving the tools to engineers so they can do more with the product, optimize it further. And then we have many projects in every single function in the company leveraging AI. And then finally, very excited that we just announced that Sterling Anderson is joining us, who has a huge background from not only autonomy, but AI. So I'm excited to see how we work together and take the company forward even faster.
That was WSJ Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker speaking with GM CEO Mary Barra at the WSJ's Future of Everything last week. You can find the full talk on WSJ.com. We've got a link to it in our show notes. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang, with Deputy Editor Chris Zinsley. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.