There’s little doubt that AI will disrupt many jobs, but it already seems to be creating some new ones.
Many LinkedIn users are adding “Vibe Coding Cleanup Specialist” to their bios. These people appear to specialize in fixing apps that were vibe coded by non-technical users that have bugs that AI — or they themselves — are unable to fix. There seem to be dozens of people on LinkedIn who now claim to be Vibe Coding AI Specialists.
Vibe coding refers to writing code using AI without actually understanding much of the code that’s generated. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, and initially referred to someone technically proficient quickly creating an app using AI. But as AI has gotten better at writing code, many people who’ve never written any code in their lives are able to vibe code apps. This works well initially, and people discover that they’re able to make a lot of progress very quickly. However, as the project gets more complex, AI’s performance seems to drops off, and it begins introducing bugs into the code, or deleting entire sections of the code that worked correctly.
At this point, many people typically despair and give up on their projects. But the more enterprising look to humans for help, and that’s where these vibe coding cleanup specialists come in. These human beings are likely experienced programmers, and either correctly prompt the AI to fix the code, or go ahead and fix it themselves.
And Vibe coding cleanup specialists can end up being a big market. Lovable, which helps non-technical users create apps, became a unicorn within 8 months of being founded, and became one of the fastest startups ever to reach a ARR of $100 million. There are other such platforms too, and it’s possible that these users will at some point get stuck and need a human vibe coding cleanup specialist to fix their botched AI-generated code. And this creates an interesting cycle in AI progress — AI is likely taking away work from some professional programmers, but given how it’s also enabling non-professionals to write code, these people seem to now need professional programmers to help fix AI’s mistakes. It remains to be seen where this ends up, but Vibe Coding Cleanup Specialist — along with the relatively short-lived Prompt Engineer — certainly seems to be a new job that AI is creating.