The Pulse: new trend of building “internal vibe-coding apps” at tech companies

Ramp and Stripe each built an internal tool that lets non-engineers make working apps from company data, and Ramp's tool is now part of every new hire's onboarding.

Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, visited Ramp, a company that makes corporate cards and finance software, and met the team behind Glass. Glass is an internal tool in which staff who are not engineers describe an app and an AI model builds it. Stripe, a payments company, has a similar tool called Harbor, and Orosz reports that many other mid-sized and large companies are building their own.

• Glass connects to Ramp's internal systems as data sources, and staff can share their apps and change each other's.
• One person in Ramp's marketing team built a custom customer database with more than 50 fields and filters.
• Stripe's Harbor was built by one engineer in about six weeks, and Ramp's tool by two engineers in a few weeks.
• Orosz gives four reasons to build rather than buy: low cost, safe access to internal data, and apps that follow the company's design library. The engineers who build the tool also learn to build AI systems.

A company that lets non-engineers build internal apps also needs to decide who reviews those apps and who maintains them once people rely on them. This is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Pretty much every non-engineer uses Glass to build their own tools.

19 October 2026: AI tools have made documents and software cheap to produce, so organisations are changing how they check effort and who is allowed to build.