Vibe coding won’t spell the end for productivity software — at least not anytime soon. That was the position of LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman during an episode of his Possible podcast released on Wednesday.
Vibe coding, a term coined earlier this year by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, refers to the growing practice of developers prompting AI systems to generate code. The approach has gained traction across Silicon Valley in recent months, with some companies even listing “vibe coding” as a necessary skill in their job postings.
Hoffman, however, cautioned against assuming that the rise of new technologies automatically means the decline of existing ones. Responding to a question on the longevity of tech shifts, he said people often “overpredict, in the new things, the death of the old.”
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He pointed to the early years of mobile technology as an example. “A classic one is when mobile started growing, people said PCs are over. And what happens is PCs grow — like mobile grows a lot more — but PCs have continued,” Hoffman explained.
In his view, the same pattern will play out with vibe coding. Rather than wiping out productivity software, he believes the two will coexist and, in some cases, complement each other.
“For example, one of the memes right now is vibe coding is going to wipe out productivity software,” Hoffman said. “What I think you’ll see is productivity software will continue, and then vibe coding is going to add on to it.”
He added that the disruption won’t be immediate or absolute. “It’s not going to be like suddenly productivity software is going to go away. That’s the pattern that people need to understand.”
Hoffman, who is also a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, underscored the point from an investor’s perspective. He said that emerging technologies often follow a cycle: they coexist with older systems for a while before eventually replacing them, but the replacement happens quickly when it does arrive.
“‘I want to bet on mobile, or I want to bet on, maybe, vibe coding,’” Hoffman said. “But it’s a very standard pattern that what happens is, it persists for a while. And then, by the way, when it dies, it dies very quickly, in a smaller number of years.”
The debate around vibe coding reflects a larger conversation happening in the software industry: whether AI-driven coding will fundamentally alter the way developers build applications and whether it signals the start of a new paradigm in productivity tools.
In fact, the landscape of productivity software already reflects Hoffman’s prediction of coexistence and integration rather than replacement. Microsoft, for instance, has not abandoned its flagship Office products but has instead layered AI on top of them through Copilot, an AI assistant that integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook. Rather than vibe coding making Office irrelevant, the company is demonstrating how AI can enhance traditional productivity workflows.
Google is following a similar path, embedding its AI model Gemini into its suite of Workspace tools. Gmail can now draft responses automatically, Google Docs can generate or summarize text, and Sheets can analyze data patterns far faster than before. Here too, productivity software is not being displaced — it is being upgraded.
Even newer entrants like Notion, long considered a modern rival to legacy productivity apps, have embraced AI not as a side experiment but as a core feature. Its “Notion AI” can summarize meetings, draft project outlines, and manage knowledge bases within the same platform users are already accustomed to.
These examples show that rather than vibe coding sweeping away productivity tools, AI is becoming a complement to them — echoing Hoffman’s larger argument that new paradigms usually build upon existing ones before reshaping them.