Vibe Coding is the New No-Code: Overhyped and Misunderstood

Everyone’s vibing, few are shipping. “Vibe coding” promises effortless creation – but behind the aesthetic lies the same old trade-off: speed now, tech debt later. Indies should enjoy the ride, not bet the house.

The hype: AI will replace engineers

Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, described vibe coding as a mode where you "fully give in to the vibes" and forget the code even exists. The idea is that you stop sweating the details, let AI handle the grunt work, and steer at a high level. It works for early-stage projects, prototyping, and MVPs, but speed is not the same as sustainability. As a project matures, reality arrives: software is mostly details, and the rest is fixing the mistakes caused by ignoring them.

If AI-driven development were the whole future, the companies with the most on the line would have already gutted their engineering teams. They haven't. Development runs in phases. There's a stretch for rapid iteration and experimentation, where vibe coding earns its place. But when precision and reliability start to matter, AI-generated code stops being a shortcut and becomes a liability.

Vibe coding feels like the new no-code. Instead of automating workflows, it automates impulsive decisions. You lean into the vibes, and the promise is that anyone can ship far faster than before.

Meanwhile, the people signing off on real budgets stay sceptical, and reasonably so. Nobody wants to stake a quarter's results on a vibe.

We've seen this film before. No-code was supposed to make engineers redundant. It didn't. It created a new category of messy, unscalable software that companies later paid real engineers to untangle. Vibe coding is an AI-fuelled rerun of that same cycle. Much like the flood of low-effort AI content already clogging feeds, a wave of AI-generated software is coming, and plenty of it will be half-built, unscalable, and destined to be rewritten.

Vibing is great for indie makers – to a point

Indie makers love speed, and vibe coding delivers exactly that: fast MVPs, quick iteration, and the ability to test ideas without hiring a dev team. For a solo founder trying to get something off the ground, it is genuinely useful.

The catch shows up once real users arrive. It's fun right until you have to untangle the mess at 3am.

When your AI-generated app breaks, you are the one debugging it. When scaling problems surface, no prompt will fix the architectural decisions baked in at the start. Use vibe coding to get moving, but have a plan for the point where the vibes wear off and real engineering has to take over.

Some makers will do well in this era. They'll use AI to iterate quickly, validate ideas, and pivot fast. The ones who win are the ones who recognise when to set the AI-generated code aside and invest in actual craftsmanship. The same instinct separates the projects that get built to last from the ones that quietly fall over, a theme worth reading more on in why some indie projects survive their creator and most don't.

The reality: AI can ship, but can it scale?

Yes, AI-assisted development lets you build faster. It's good for:

• Zero-to-one product development
• Rapid prototyping
• Side projects and simple applications
• Startups that just need something functional fast

What the loudest evangelists tend to skip is what happens at scale, where the cracks show.

Debugging AI-generated code is genuinely painful. Developer forums are full of people who can't fix the code their assistant produced, because they never understood it in the first place. Technical debt stacks up quickly, and rewriting instead of debugging just adds more barely-working layers. AI can generate working code, but it doesn't design a system that holds up under millions of users. And the systems where failure has real consequences, such as booking, payments, or anything medical, aren't being built on vibes. When the downside is severe, AI-generated code is not your ally. This is the same reliability gap explored in why AI won't kill SaaS, but sameness will wipe out the unprepared.

The business model fallacy: "just vibe code an AI alternative to Figma"

A popular hot take makes the rounds every few months: why don't a group of vibe coders band together and build AI-powered alternatives to Figma, Adobe, or DocuSign?

Common sense should answer it. You can't replace tried-and-tested software with AI-generated code held together by duct tape and hope.

If vibe coding could topple products backed by years of R&D and enormous marketing budgets, we'd already be swimming in AI-powered unicorns. We aren't, because building real software is harder than pasting prompts into a tool and hoping for the best.

Here's why the shortcut fails. Software is craft, not just code. Adobe agreed to pay around $20B for Figma before the deal was called off under regulatory pressure, which tells you what a mature design tool is actually worth, and it wasn't the code alone. Shipping ten times faster doesn't mean anyone will want the result. Business users buying into core workflows want reliability and stability above a cheap AI-generated substitute. And scale is where the real bills land: infrastructure costs, performance work, and backwards compatibility will eat a prototype alive.

Software is craft, design, and trust. The code is only where all of that shows up.

Vibe coding projects vs commercial software: the gap no one wants to talk about

Creating is fun. Humans are wired for it. Selling software to businesses is less fun: security, compliance, scaling, uptime commitments, and customers who expect things to work every time.

Vibe coding thrives in the playground of experimentation. Software that matters needs stability, performance, and trust. Enterprises don't care how fast you spun up a prototype if it buckles under real load.

The plain version: vibe coding is great for weekend hacks and MVPs, but the moment contracts, regulations, and uptime commitments enter the picture, you need more than vibes. You need real engineering.

The future: what vibe coding is actually good for

Vibe coding isn't killing engineering. It's absorbing the cheaper end of the work:

• Basic websites and CRUD apps
• One-off automation scripts
• Low-stakes internal tools
• Rapid idea validation
• Side projects that don't need long-term maintenance

The people who gain most are non-technical founders who can now launch faster. The ones who lose are the ones betting that AI has retired the high-calibre engineer. It hasn't.

Final word

So, should you learn vibe coding? Sure. It's useful. Just don't mistake it for the future of all software. When it's time to build something that has to hold up, you'll still need engineers who know what they're doing.

If you're building something meant to last, AI can assist, but it won't save you. Vibe coding is fun right up until you need to build a software business. That's when the vibes run out. If you're thinking about turning a vibe-coded project into something sellable, what vibe coding means for actually selling a project is worth a read before you list.

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