Vibe coding is on the rise. The term, popularized by Andrej Karpathy, describes the act of coding by simply uttering commands to AI assistants like Cursor. Here is Andrej’s description of vibe coding:
Since Andrej’s post, a new wave of ‘vibe coders’ has been taking shape. Indie hackers like levelsio are also in the party. Levelsio recently ‘vibe-coded’ a whole game and made more than 80,000 USD in revenue in a matter of weeks. Sure, his large audience and influencer status may have played a role, but it was enough to excite even more wannabe vibe-coders.
Vibe coding is now a burgeoning tech movement. Will it last? Only time will tell.
What is fundamentally interesting about vibe coding is that it frees the imagination. It allows for simple and rapid iteration on tech ideas. It helps lower the barrier to entry for software creation, even by non-coders.
As a result, thanks to vibe coding, it is easier to imagine a lot of home-cooked software, personal software being built.
Think about the software you use daily. Most of the time, you use less than 40% of its functionality. For most software, it is even lower. General-purpose software tries to cater to the needs of a lot of different users with one UI. The problem is that often means offering an average experience across the board for everyone instead of a highly specific one for each target user.
Vibe coding is nice for developing small prototypes and iterating faster, but what strikes me as potentially revolutionary is that coding assistants, when used properly, will basically reduce the cost of producing software and thus make it more likely that people will produce highly specific software with fewer features — just the features they need for their workflows. That’s what I call personal software or home-cooked software.
Now, I anticipate that not everyone will enjoy or want to create custom software. Most people will continue to enjoy general-purpose software, and that is fine. It is a bit like cooking. Everyone can cook at home, but most of us still like dining at a restaurant.
One of the reasons we have SaaS and general-purpose software is that for most people and most organizations, it is more cost-effective to outsource the cost of maintaining software quality to an external entity. Imagine having to maintain and develop new features for your custom Microsoft PowerPoint. That takes time and effort, and time is our most valuable resource as humans on this earth. Wouldn’t you rather spend those three hours playing with your son or something?
Vibe coding a prototype for fun is easy. Developing a robust software solution with auth, security, best practices, etc., is way harder, and vibe coders can’t do that yet. Maybe they never will.
Some vibe-coders are already facing the consequences of not knowing the code behind the applications they have generated:
So vibe coding is a nice way to democratize software creation (mostly simple prototypes), but a bit overrated. Don’t believe people who boldly claim that software engineering is dying. To build robust and complex software, you still need to learn, understand, and master programming languages and computer science in general.
The people who will primarily create personal software are those who already know how to code and will be able to prototype faster because of AI coding assistants.
Learn to code! Then vibe code!
