'Vibe Coding' is Letting 10 Engineers Do the Work of a Team of 50 To 100, Says YC CEO

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said startups are reaching $1-10 million annual revenue with fewer than 10 employees due to 'vibe coding,' a term coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February.

'You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps,' Tan told CNBC (video). 'You don't have to hire someone to do it, you just talk directly to the large language model that wrote it and it'll fix it for you.' What would've once taken '50 or 100' engineers to build, he believes can now be accomplished by a team of 10, 'when they are fully vibe coders.' He adds: 'When they are actually really, really good at using the cutting edge tools for code gen today, like Cursor or Windsurf, they will literally do the work of 10 or 100 engineers in the course of a single day.'

According to Tan, 81% of Y Combinator's current startup batch consists of AI companies, with 25% having 95% of their code written by large language models. Despite limitations in debugging capabilities, Tan said the technology enables small teams to perform work previously requiring dozens of engineers and makes previously overlooked niche markets viable for software businesses.

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