You can always make it better. You can improve things. But it does give you a good taste of what can be done in vibe coding. Those are things that I made maybe in 15 minutes, half an hour. It is quite simple to get those first steps and say, "Oh, this works." Maybe you want to do some improvements, and you refine the code and what you're expecting.
It took Rebecca Yu seven days to vibe code her dining app. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from people in a group chat not being able to decide where to eat. Armed with determination, Claude, and ChatGPT, Yu decided to just build a dining app from scratch - one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests.
The concept of vibe coding is not even a year old. Apple was forced, for the first time, to allow external payment links in the US. Apps became easier to build than ever. Kids now want to become developers to drive lambos. There are courses promising millions if you learn to build apps, turning app development into what drop shipping was a few years ago.
Opinion It is a truth universally acknowledged that a singular project possessed of prospects is in want of a team. That team has to be built from good developers with experience, judgement, analytic and logic skills, and strong interpersonal communication. Where AI coding fits in remains strongly contentious. Opinion on vibe coding in corporate IT is more clearly stated: you're either selling the stuff or steering well clear.
If you've used an AI coding assistant before, you've probably experienced vibe coding. You start with an idea, throw a high-level prompt at the AI, and wait to see what comes out. Sometimes it's close. Sometimes it's completely off. Either way, it often takes several rounds of tweaking to get what you actually want. That endless loop of prompting, generating, and fixing can get frustrating fast.
Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it. Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools for startups, to analyze transaction data from more than 200,000 customers between June and August. The report, released Thursday, tracked where startups are spending their AI dollars and identified the top 50 AI-native application companies based on spending data.
Analysts wrote that much of that revenue comes from month-to-month subscribers who may churn as quickly as they signed up, putting the durability of those flashy numbers in doubt. While these young companies have disclosed surging ARR, they could have "questionable economics," the analysts wrote, noting that sales gains like this could come from short-term subscribers who might not stick around.
There is a spectrum of opinions on how dramatically all creative professions will be changed by the coming wave of agentic AI, from the very skeptical to the wildly optimistic and even apocalyptic. I think that even if you are on the "skeptical" end of the spectrum, it makes sense to explore ways this new technology can help with your everyday work.
For a long time, I wanted to be able to build small, specific apps for personal use. But I'm a designer, not a developer. One option was to learn how to code, but honestly, I was never interested in doing that. Another path was using no-code tools like Glide or Bubble. I built a few things that way, but still felt pretty limited. Then AI tools arrived, and everything changed.
Vibe Coding began with a modest description: Karpathy framed it as a way to use AI as a coding assistant through natural language. But as the term spread, it was quickly inflated - spawning offshoots like "context engineering" and promises of faster prototyping, instant creation, and lowered barriers, even the idea that anyone could code without really coding. A lighter vision than the Metaverse, but one that also stretches language further than reality can hold. Both are wrapped in the language of transformation.
infamously boasting that the tech was doing the work of " 700 full-time agents" last year - only to regret his decision months later, admitting that humans play an important role after all.