On stage at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration in Redmond earlier this month, CEO Satya Nadella showed a video of himself retracing the code of the company’s first-ever product, with help from AI.

“You know intelligence has been commoditized when CEOs can start vibe coding,” he told the hundreds of employees in attendance.

The comment was a sign of how much this term—and the act and mindset it aptly describes—have taken root in the tech world. Over the past few months, the normally exacting art of coding has seen a profusion of vibes thanks to AI.

The meme started with a post from former Tesla Senior Director of AI Andrej Karpathy in February. Karpathy described it as an approach to coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

The concept gained traction because it touched on a transformation—a vibe shift?—that was already underway among some programmers, according to Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of AI app development platform Replit. As LLM-powered tools like Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf—which is reportedly in talks to be acquired by OpenAI—have gotten smarter, AI has made it easier to just…sort of…wing it.

“Coding has been seen as this—as hard a science as you can get. It’s very concrete, mathematical structure, and needs to be very precise,” Masad told Tech Brew. “What is the opposite of precision? It is vibes, and so it is communicating to the public that coding is no longer about precision. It’s more about vibes, ideas, and so on.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The Georgia network of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches announced it will install microgrids in five churches across the state this year, and hopes to eventually install microgrids in all 482 of the AME churches in Georgia.

The microgrids are part of a clean energy program in which the AME Church Sixth District, the district that includes Georgia’s AME churches, will install other green tech updates to churches, like solar panels, EV charging stations, battery storage, and bidirectional charging. In a press release, the Sixth District said these updates will allow “church facilities to serve as energy hubs” for members to “charge medical equipment, store medicines, and seek shelter in an emergency.”

“Churches are critical partners in the clean energy transition,” Alicia Brown, the director of Georgia Bright, a Solar for All recipient and partner of the Sixth District, said in a press release. “When the community has a need or a disaster strikes, [churches] are often the first organizations to step up and offer help.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Almost everybody has an opinion about the future of AI these days. But what do experts who spend day in and day out studying this technology think about its impact?

That’s what a recently published poll of more than 4,200 AI researchers from University College London aims to pin down. The authors claim the preprint paper is the largest social science survey of such technologists to date.

One caveat, however, is that the authors conducted the survey last summer, before the progress of the last several months, including the advent of reasoning models.

On the whole, the global pool of researchers—71% of whom have PhDs—were optimistic or neutral about the future of AI. More than half (54%) said AI has more benefits than risks, 33% said benefits and risks are roughly equal, and 9% said risks outnumber benefits.

Risk analysis: Among the top potential positives of AI that researchers cited were increased access to education (75%), making jobs easier (72%), improved access to healthcare (57%), and ease of household tasks (55%). Their top concerns were around the misinformation and fake news (77%), personal data being used without consent (65%), increases in cybercrime (59%), and reducing social interaction (47%).

Keep reading here.—PK