Day: August 6, 2025

• South Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai Heavy won a maintenance contract for US Navy cargo ship USNS Alan Shepard.
• The US and South Korea are exploring closer cooperation on shipbuilding and maintenance.
• South Korea boasts a major shipbuilding industry that could have answers for the Navy’s problems.

A leading South Korean shipyard has won a repair contract for a US Navy auxiliary supply ship as the sea service looks to allies for assistance in maintaining the fleet.

South Korea is a prominent allied shipbuilding power in the Pacific, and the US has been exploring closer cooperation that could provide answers as the Navy takes a hard look at the American yards constructing and doing maintenance on its ships.

On Wednesday, HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. announced that it had secured a maintenance, repair, and overhaul contract for the US Navy Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Alan Shepard. The overhaul will begin in September near HD Hyundai’s headquarters in Ulsan on the southeastern coast.

The planned repair work will include propeller cleaning, tank maintenance, and inspections of onboard equipment. Alan Shepard is expected to be delivered to the Navy in November. The Navy didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the upcoming work.

The contracted work is “highly significant,” Joon Won-ho, head of HD Hyundai Heavy Industries’ Naval and Special Ship Business Unit said, per the company’s statement, because it marks the first contract following the South Korean government’s proposal for a joint shipbuilding initiative with the US — MAGSA, or Make American Shipbuilding Great Again.

South Korean officials proposed this MASGA initiative late last month as Washington and Seoul negotiated and navigated tariffs. The $150 billion partnership will be led by South Korean shipbuilders and help strengthen the US shipbuilding industry, including constructing new yards, supporting worker training, and assisting with ship maintenance.

President Donald Trump and some other US officials have said that building more Navy ships and fixing broader shipbuilding and maintenance problems are top priorities, although questions remain on how the administration plans to pursue that.

Before the MASGA initiative, HD Hyundai was already working closely with American shipbuilders, including a strategic partnership agreement with Huntington Ingalls Industries, among other collaborations in the US commercial sector.

Other South Korean shipbuilders have also been helping with Navy repair and maintenance. In March, Hanwha Ocean finished up a regular overhaul on the USNS Wally Schirra, another Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship. The repair work marked the first time that a South Korean yard had bid on and won a regular overhaul contract of that scale for that type of vessel.

In the MASGA proposal, South Korea’s top shipbuilders — HD Hyundai, Hanwha Ocean, and Samsung Heavy Industries — agreed to cooperate on exploring how to bolster America’s industry.

While US allies and partners have been involved in helping maintain the Navy’s fleet before, there has been a ramp-up in cooperation. US experts and officials have noted that Indo-Pacific allies, namely South Korea and Japan, have robust shipbuilding industries that may have answers to Navy problems.

Some potential solutions observed in allied shipyards include better in-house worker training and more effective and efficient ship designs that reduce the labor hours needed to construct, maintain, and modernize vessels. Some models from outside the defense sector may also be applicable to military shipbuilding.

Navy leaders have acknowledged that the service can learn from the shipbuilding capabilities of its allies and partners. In April 2024, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro visited a South Korean shipyard and said he was “floored at the level of digitization and real-time monitoring of shipbuilding progress, with readily available information down to individual pieces of stock material.”

During that trip, Del Toro encouraged South Korean companies to invest in commercial and naval shipbuilding facilities in the US, as many were “largely intact and dormant” and “ripe for redevelopment.”

The current Navy secretary, John Phelan, visited both Hanwha Ocean Shipbuilding and HD Hyundai Heavy Industries in April and emphasized the value of South Korean yards in helping the US Navy maintain readiness in the Indo-Pacific, a priority theater where competition with China, a shipbuilding juggernaut with a substantial fleet, is a key focus for the Department of Defense.

“Leveraging the expertise of these highly capable shipyards enables timely maintenance and repairs for our vessels to operate at peak performance,” Phelan said. “This level of large-scale repair and maintenance capability strengthens our combat readiness, sustains forward deployed operational presence, and reinforces regional stability.”

In addition to the Wally Schirra, a South Korean yard has also worked on USNS Yukon, which is a Henry J. Kaiser-class underway replenishment oiler.

These discussions come as the Navy struggles to address long-standing issues in how it builds and maintains its fleet.

There are backlogs in maintenance, and major shipbuilding programs have faced significant delays and overrun costs due to a range of factors, such as workforce issues, limited shipyard capacity, supply chain disruptions, and logistics and timeline problems.

The problems have raised concerns in Washington about fleet size and readiness as the US focuses on deterring and preparing to fight a potential conflict with an adversary like China. The Navy has said that South Korean shipbuilding is an asset to the US as China’s shipbuilding industry dominates the global market and pumps out military vessels at an alarming rate.

• Many companies are encouraging employees to vibe code. But there are limits.
• Developers say vibe coding is best for low-stakes experimentation and not critical work.
• Still, the buzz around vibe coding has produced a funding frenzy in recent months.

In late June, the CEO of a tech startup halted all software development at the company. He wanted to ensure every team member who worked with code was up to speed on the latest trend: vibe coding.

“You start to realize, wow, these things could move way faster,” Rowan Trollope, the CEO of Redis, a software company, told Business Insider.

He immediately approved the use of all AI-assisted coding tools. Then the company launched a weeklong hackathon that challenged teams of employees to “use all the latest and greatest AI technologies to do something cool,” Trollope said.

Companies have found, however, that despite the excitement — and the millions in funding pouring into vibe coding companies — the technology is still limited. So, many CEOs are developing new policies and tools to maximize the benefits of vibe coding while mitigating the pitfalls.

Vibe coding is when developers (or anyone, really) prompt AI to generate code. In a survey of hundreds of engineers in May, Jellyfish, a software intelligence platform, found that 90% of them had integrated AI into their work, up from 61% just a year ago.

Vibe coding is now a marketable skill in Silicon Valley. Companies from Visa to Reddit to DoorDash are posting jobs that require vibe coding experience or familiarity with AI coding tools. Meta now allows job candidates to use an AI assistant in their coding interviews.

The term was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February. “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 a post on X. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

Limits to the technology remain, however. Though vibe coding promises quick productivity gains and allows people with little coding experience to create software, tech executives say AI is still prone to mistakes, often writes unnecessarily long code, or lacks the proper architecture. So Trollope and other tech CEOs have had to introduce parameters for its use.

Trollope said vibe coding is best for building proof of concepts, writing tests, and validating existing code, but not necessarily developing any of the company’s core software. “It’s still not in a place yet where we would trust it with our core technology,” he said.

While still limited, this new, more freewheeling approach has gained momentum in part thanks to the money flowing into vibe coding platforms. Last month, Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor, announced a $900 million Series C fundraise at a $9.9 billion valuation. Wix, a web-development platform, announced that it had acquired the vibe coding platform Base44 for $80 million.

Replit, a code editor, saw revenue grow fivefold in September after it released Agent, a coding assistant that works with natural language prompts. By June, the company landed a new $250 million funding round that brought its valuation to $3 billion, according to Forbes. Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable, one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups, raised $200 million in Series A funding in July at a $1.8 billion valuation, according to PitchBook.

The funding frenzy pushed AirTable, a database development platform, to relaunch last month as a fully AI-native platform. As part of the overhaul, the company created an app-building assistant called Omni for vibe coders. It allows developers to “conversationally vibe generate the app they want, but understand what’s been generated all the way down to the data and logic layer as well,” AirTable said in a blog post announcing the overhaul.

“There’s still a question of: Is that an AI tourist attraction? Is it going to be durable? Is it going to be high churn?” AirTable CEO Howie Liu told Business Insider. But “all these people are coming in and pulling out their credit cards to try it out.” For AirTable, “not fully reinventing ourselves is kind of like a guaranteed path to obsolescence,” Liu said.

With the launch of Omni, Liu also saw an opportunity to correct some of the problems that come with vibe coding.

With vibe coding, “you’re not really inspecting the code, you’re not really thinking about the technical architecture, you’re just telling it what you want it to build and kind of like clicking the ‘I’m feeling lucky button,'” Liu said. “The magical thing is like the AI has gotten good enough that it seemingly just works some of the time.” But even apps that “seemingly work” can be riddled with errors and security vulnerabilities at their deeper, infrastructure layers.

In a perfect world, developers could leverage artificial general intelligence to code apps given the breadth of information that developers need to reason through, Liu said. Until then, developers need a “two-way feedback loop between the agent that is building the code, or building the app, and the user, the human, who’s guiding it and saying, ‘here’s what I actually want you to build.'”

At Redis, humans are convening internal groups to share best prompting practices to improve their part of the equation, Trollope said. “I think people do go on a journey where you start very small and you very quickly realize the prompts can get longer and longer and more and more complicated,” he said.