Steven Bartlett, the host of the podcast “The Diary of a CEO,” apparently takes a vibes-based approach to recruitment, and loves it when potential new hires say they use AI to actually do their jobs.
According to Isaac Martin, the director of innovation at Bartlett’s media brand Flight Story, Bartlett now prioritizes hiring people who can “vibe code,” or heavily use AI to write code and dream up entire programs, regardless of their technical background.
“Previously, there would’ve been a big focus on developers, as that’s the typical sort of person you would expect to be within the innovation team,” Martin told Business Insider. “We’re very much now looking for people who are much more within that vibe coding space, people who have experience across almost any area, really, within our industry.”
Bartlett is the founder and CEO of Steven.com, a media company that owns multiple content creation brands, including Flight Story, and he rarely misses an opportunity to gush about AI. Explaining Bartlett’s thinking, Martin told BI that vibe coding allows people to use their previous experience and knowledge to figure out where new value can be created.
“We have the ability to then develop and innovate within those spaces,” he added.
There’s been a surge of enthusiasm — and anxiety among both workers and investors — this past year over AI’s ability to perform coding tasks. Former OpenAI exec Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” early last year to capture the free-spirited, throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach that ever more powerful AI coding assistants were encouraging, especially for inexperienced programmers.
Noobs could basically make their own apps by talking to an AI chatbot. Experienced programmers could use the tools to help troubleshoot a problem or churn out less important code. The vibes, at least if you were an AI booster, were good.
But when you use an AI programming tool to throw spaghetti at the wall, it turns out it will also produce spaghetti code, as evidenced by many amateur vibe-coded projects that turned out to be bug-filled messes. The AIs also sometimes fail to follow instructions and make catastrophic errors, like wiping out one business’s entire database.
Even professional programmers have fallen victim to the vicissitudes of vibe-coding. Several outages at Amazon Web Services last year were caused when the company’s in-house AI coding tool made disastrous changes, including in one case deleting the entire coding environment. This March, Amazon leadership admitted that “gen-AI assisted changes” were causing a “trend of incidents” that were disrupting its e-commerce business, saying it would require more oversight on how AI-coding changes are implemented.
At the end of the day, it’s Bartlett’s company. But it’s hard to see why vibe-coding would be such a valuable trait, given that it’s predicated on possessing little skill in the first place. Maybe it exhibits a blind willingness to embrace the hot new thing. He also has something like a vibes based take on Vogue‘s cultural literacy test for new hires in the 90s: a 35-question “Culture Test,” which asks if you “embrace new innovations or are you resistant?” Christiana Brenton, FlightStory’s CRO and cofounder, told BI.
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