According to a report by Business Insider today (29th), DoorDash co-founder and CEO Xu Xun said that vibe coding accounts for only a small part of the complete software engineering system and cannot represent the entirety of engineering work.
Xu Xun said: “Software engineers spend only part of each day writing code, and it is certainly valuable that existing models can handle programming on their behalf. The time actually spent delivering code may account for 25%, 30%, or 50%, and AI primarily improves efficiency in that corresponding part.”
Similarly, engineers also spend a great deal of time participating in product reviews and design meetings and aligning with different business teams, and these tasks likewise require AI involvement. “If the other aspects do not change together and cannot be connected, it will be difficult for companies to achieve the expected productivity gains through AI coding alone. The entire industry is exploring how to streamline workflows so that being AI-native is no longer limited to code development, but instead extends to the way businesses actually operate.”
At an earnings call in May this year, Xu Xun candidly admitted that AI had not yet changed DoorDash’s organizational structure. “AI has already brought significant efficiency gains. More than half of DoorDash’s existing code is now written by AI, and the proportion may already be close to two-thirds. But the proportion of code output alone still cannot explain how workflows and team structures should be adjusted.”
Even Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term “vibe coding,” has publicly acknowledged that vibe coding has considerable limitations for engineers. In a speech in April, he directly criticized the state of the field, saying that AI-generated code remains messy. “Sometimes I feel a sense of dread when I see that code, because its quality is not always particularly good. This code is often bloated and redundant, filled with extensive copy-and-paste, while its abstractions are frequently awkward and fragile. The program may run, but the code is really ugly.”