As Goldman Sachs restricts vibe coding, developers express how annoying it is

If you're a salesperson or a trader who likes being busy on Github Copilot and you've designed some tools which you use to monitor trade flows, email content, or calculate prices, then you probably don't want to work for Goldman Sachs.

But maybe you don't want to work for any other banks either. 

Bloomberg reported this week that Goldman restricted the use of vibe coding on Github and Claude Code to technical staff and strats. Traders who had been using the tools for things like 'monitoring client trading flows, modeling market changes and positions, and creating written and graphic content,' were peeved, said Bloomberg.

Goldman Sachs didn't comment for this article. One senior developer at the firm said there had been "massive pushback" about the restrictions, and that hundreds of tools have been developed by individuals in the period, with many of them improving personal productivity. "Vibe coding allowed senior and junior people to develop things according to their taste," he says. Goldman's salespeople and traders, "developed things which were pretty useful from people who had never coded before," he adds.

It's not clear what happens to those tools now. It's thought that Goldman's restriction on vibe coding came into place a few months ago and the firm isn't commenting on whether it's imposed a restriction on the use of tools previously created. Many have noted that Marco Argenti, Chief Information Officer of Goldman Sachs, said in July that the firm's business people, such as traders or private wealth staff, were creating non-productionised tools which were sent to engineers for "hardening."

It's this hardening that may have been the problem. A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs told Bloomberg, "“We make certain AI tools available to our people to determine the best use cases across different parts of the firm. After a period of experimentation where we assess a variety of factors including productivity and risk management, we put them in the hands of those who are best suited to leverage them for the long term.”

The senior developer at the firm suggests the sheer volume of tools being created is the issue. There was a "proliferation," he says. Data sensitivity was an issue. So was the fact that individual salespeople and traders had tools they owned themselves, that might be circulated to others on a team.

Goldman is far from the only bank experiencing this. A senior developer at JPMorgan said there's a similar problem there. "People outside tech vibe code whole UIs and products and then it's on engineering to explain why we can't just put it into production," he says. 

The JPM developer says non-technical people simply transfer the load of work onto engineering. "They leave out the boring stuff like authentication, entitlements, end to end testing, build and deployment," he tells us. "You'll just get a load of slop that works locally for a demo."

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