The vibes are off the rails

Welcome to Runtime! Today: The latest in the long-running saga of enterprise tech marketing departments trying and failing to look cool, Oracle customers are receiving extortion attempts after a breach, and the latest enterprise moves.

(Please forward this email to a friend or colleague! And if it was forwarded to you, sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

You keep using that word

As companies start to figure out where generative AI tools can actually improve their day-to-day workflows, "vibe coding" assistants have emerged as the most promising candidate. And in keeping with years of enterprise tech tradition, the word "vibe" is starting to lose all meaning as companies desperate to drum up business to offset their AI investments latch on to the term.

Microsoft and Salesforce each announced "vibe"-related products this week in an attempt to associate themselves with the Cursors, Loveables, and Replits of the world, startups that are seeing ground-roots adoption among developers. The term "vibe coding," for the uninitiated, was popularized by software engineer Andrej Karpathy earlier this year in describing the rise of AI coding assistants.

• "There’s a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," Karpathy wrote in February. "It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing."
• In March Simon Willison expanded on Karpathy's definition: "When I talk about vibe coding I mean building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes."
• Under this umbrella, vibe coding functions like a helpful idea-generation machine rather than a proper software development tool itself, or as Willison described it, "One of the biggest barriers to [the] profession is the incredibly steep initial learning curve — vibe coding shaves that initial barrier down to almost flat."

But as tends to happen, at this point in 2025 the term has taken on a life of its own to mean "using generative AI tools to do a job," which is much broader than originally intended. And in the "how do you do, fellow kids?" approach to marketing used by most Big Tech companies, it's starting to get a little cringe.

• On Tuesday Microsoft's Sumit Chauhan told The Verge that new agents in Microsoft 365 are "bringing vibe working [emphasis ours] to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat. … It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
• As Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic put it after reading that story, "feels like we're living through some kind of cultural gas leak."
• Not to be outdone by any company when it comes to jumping on a trend, on Wednesday Salesforce introduced "Agentforce Vibes" and a coding agent called "Vibe Codey."
• Salesforce's Dan Fernandez told TechCrunch that "it really is that end-to-end experience for having an enterprise vibe coding for the agentic enterprise," which is another sentence that prompts you to stare off into the distance for a while.

Any term that breaks out within tech circles is bound to be abused by marketers; my washing machine has an "AI" light that appears to do absolutely nothing. But one month away from the three-year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT, the situation is starting to look a little desperate for companies that have bet heavily on generative AI technology but have yet to see a fraction of the adoption that the original vibe coding tools have enjoyed.

• Microsoft's "vibe working" tool for Microsoft Excel produced an accurate result just 57.2% of the time on a popular spreadsheet benchmark, compared to the 71.3% accuracy the average human user is expected to produce for a similar task, and it's hard to see why anyone would run their business on a coin flip.
• And having failed to make 2025 "the year of the agent," Salesforce appears to be trying to embrace yet another concept invented elsewhere through the power of sheer enthusiasm.
• In a talk earlier this year, Karpathy was clear that while the technology behind vibe coding is extremely promising, it will take a very long time to mature.
• But it's also clear that companies under investor pressure to show returns on their AI investments are getting antsy, which is not a good vibe.

Please check out the latest edition of the Runtime Roundtable, which this time around asked our distinguished panel of enterprise tech experts a very topical question: What is the best way to think about application deployment across cloud providers and self-managed data centers for both traditional and AI applications?

Thanks as always to our panel, and if you are interested in sponsoring a future edition of the Roundtable, please contact us here.

Nice business you got there

Several executives at companies that are running Oracle's E-Business Suite of ERP applications are dealing with extortion attempts this week after a security breach, according to Bloomberg. The well-known Cl0p ransomware gang appears to have infiltrated E-Business Suite customers that did not patch a security flaw disclosed in July, and are demanding as much as $50 million to prevent the release of sensitive information.

To its credit, after initially refusing to publicly confirm a breach of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure earlier this year, Oracle acknowledged Thursday that "our ongoing investigation has found the potential use of previously identified vulnerabilities that are addressed in the July 2025 Critical Patch Update." Patches for that flaw are available here.

You might remember the Cl0p folks from the 2023 MOVEit security debacle, which was one of the largest security breaches to date. It's not clear whether any of the affected parties have paid ransom to the attackers, but any ERP application manages an incredible amount of sensitive business data.

Enterprise moves

Judson Althoff is the new CEO of commercial business at Microsoft, a newly created role for the longtime sales leader that the company said will allow CEO Satya Nadella to focus more of his time on product development and engineering.

Max Christoff is the new chief technology officer at Everlaw, joining the legal SaaS company after several years in engineering leadership roles at Google.

The Runtime roundup

Hackers stole reams of sensitive customer data from Red Hat's GitLab account, affecting organization such as Fidelity, Walmart, and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to Bleeping Computer.

Databricks acquired Mooncake Labs, a startup working on real-time storage applications, for an undisclosed amount to add to its "lakebase" push.

AWS is aggressively marketing its cloud surveillance technology to law enforcement agencies at a super disconcerting time for those groups to be using such a questionably effective service, according to Forbes.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!