THE CRUNCH
Protein design software has long demanded expert knowledge: you needed to specify enzyme mechanisms down to individual amino acid positions, and even the water molecules sitting in the catalytic site, before the tool would build the rest of the protein around your target. A large collaboration of researchers based in China has now built a tool that takes natural language prompts and produces proteins with the function you describe, Ars Technica reports. In a separate announcement, Hugging Face said it is hosting a tool that does something similar at the DNA level.
The comparison being drawn is to vibe coding, where plain descriptions stand in for detailed technical specifications. The catch is that a working protein is not guaranteed: by that measure the success rate may not be great, and the designs still need a lab to sort the good ones from the dozens of failures. So this lowers the barrier to specifying a design, not to verifying one.