The New Wave Of "vibe Coding"

• This is my first article, trying to learn this craft. It’s a compilation of comments I’ve made on various platforms across the web. I tried to bring some sense to something that’s inherently disconnected. Hope this helps ease your concerns about all the AI hype.
• 7-minute read.

Stone Soups

I don’t know how to cook, at least not at the level of people who claim they can. But I do have plenty of experience with "Vibe Cooking." I could probably teach a class on it. I know how to fry an egg and make instant noodles; I know you need to add a bit of water when reheating rice and that butter is better than oil or margarine when frying an egg. Nothing more sophisticated to report.

I know how to boil water, throw in some noodles (without the seasoning packet because it’s pure sodium), add some tomato sauce, and mix in whatever leftovers I have from the previous day. I season it with salt, oregano, and parsley if I have any, plus some pepper. If there’s ground beef, great. If not, a hot dog or boiled egg will do—I handle that in a parallel task. If I’m feeling extra creative, I throw in some beans and crispy potato sticks. The result is the famous "stone soup" dish.

It’s funny to watch, maybe even TikTok-worthy, but I won’t be opening a restaurant or making money off it—unless, of course, I had thousands of followers. Since I’m a nobody in the grand scheme of things, I just make it for myself. And it gets the job done because I don’t enjoy cooking and have no desire to learn.

Influencers might strike gold here. Plenty of them are blowing up on Instagram and TikTok doing worse. It’s probably just a bandwagon effect—I don’t see it as a sustainable business. But it’s fascinating to watch.

X/@levesio recently shared his goal of making $1 million ARR with his fly-game, built entirely through vibe coding. A pretty profitable stone soup. I’m keeping a close eye on it to figure all this out.

Vibe Cooking Isn't a Threat

No top chef has ever lost sleep over the rise of kitchen gadgets or the industrialization of instant noodles. Plenty of regular folks are making vibe cooking meals at home with ramen and pasta. The upside: They don’t have to spend money eating out. And yet, restaurants are still packed, and food trucks still line the streets next to hot dog stands.

I compare AI assistants to kitchen appliances like microwaves, using the same perspective as Chef Gordon Ramsay: they’re incredibly useful, but if you rely on them for everything, your food will turn out awful. Just knowing how to use a microwave or an air-fryer doesn’t make you a chef. Top chefs still own professional knife sets because so much of their work is hands-on and artisanal. That won’t change anytime soon. The same goes for programming—especially when it comes to game development, which is almost an art form.

Vibe coding has brought a lot of curious newcomers into the tech field—the so-called citizen developers—and that’s great. Encouraging people to learn programming and creating job opportunities benefits any country. I see huge potential in improving tools for vibe coding. Maybe in the near future, we’ll get better approaches to handling the non-deterministic nature of LLMs.

But I don’t think many of them will stick around. At first, it’s fun—until the AI stops "vibing," and you actually have to roll up your sleeves and dive into the code. Coding can be tedious for some; it requires methodical thinking. I’ve already seen posts from people who built a SaaS and lost patience fixing bugs. Now they just want to sell it and move on.

That’s why I’m not convinced that vibe coding is a sustainable business model for citizen developers. Coding is just one piece of the puzzle—most people don’t understand how we can sit for eight hours staring at a screen, “chewing” through code. Computer science has evolved massively over the last few decades; there’s a lot to learn, and the technical jargon alone is intimidating. But I could be wrong. Like I said, I’m watching this space closely because it’s fascinating.

The AI Boogeyman

Back in the ’90s, CASE tools and code generators stirred up the same kind of panic. Marketers swore programming jobs would disappear. They sold well at first, mostly due to psychological pressure rather than real utility. But soon, people got fed up with "programming" because they weren’t cut out for it—or didn’t want to learn something new. And when maintenance time came around, no one wanted to sit down and fix the spaghetti code these tools generated. They dumped it on analysts and developers, who usually decided it was better to scrap everything and start over.

Now, I see many developers genuinely worried about losing their jobs or struggling to stay in the industry. The rise of vibe coding is making it worse, fueled by AI hype. Big tech and startups are promoting this sensationalism, but programmers aren’t their real target—investors are. That’s why there are so many sketchy AI demos (see: the infamous Devin). It doesn’t matter if it “still” doesn’t work 100%. As long as it wows people, it’s got potential. That’s why billions are being poured into AI—because of its potential.

This fear-mongering around junior devs doesn’t make sense. Companies are slashing salaries, cutting hiring, and spreading fear that AI will take over junior roles—all to keep the AI hype going and inflate stock prices. They’re discouraging the next generation. Eventually, it’ll end up like the COBOL market—where the experienced devs are aging out, and no new talent wants in.

In my opinion, this entropy is temporary. Things feel chaotic due to the hype, but it will stabilize. AI won’t replace programmers—it’ll push companies to invest more in software development due to the efficiency AI brings. That means more job openings, especially for juniors. But patience is key while this “circus” winds down.

Brave New World

We’re witnessing another shift in computer programming. We’ll keep coding, but the "modus operandi" will change—just like it did when we moved on from punch cards and floppy disks or when Flash was replaced by HTML5 and modern frontend frameworks. The '90s and early 2000s brought a wave of new programming languages, and I believe we’ll see more in the coming years.

Recently, AI has introduced a fresh batch of IDEs and tools, just like the early 2000s gave us Eclipse, Xcode, IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, and VS Code. In tech, people don’t cling to the past. (Almost) everyone adapts quickly—it’s part of the job.

There’ll probably be even bigger impacts. AI chatting sites are affecting platforms like Stack Overflow and CodeProject, which now face the risk of extinction, just like Google impacted other search engines. Social media is increasingly full of AI-powered bots, YouTube now has AI-made videos, and Spotify is loaded with artificially generated music.

The work AI does in coding is still mostly autocomplete, based on what it’s scraped from the web. The other day, I asked ChatGPT to generate a lexer and parser in Python for JavaScript. It spat out a program using the ply library—code that was straight from a GitHub repo. It just copied and pasted someone’s work...

But these are fascinating times, living through this evolution with these tools at our fingertips. Using the ChatGPT app to practice English fluency is surreal—20 years ago, that’d be sci-fi. And sometimes GitHub Copilot suggests code that blows my mind, like it’s reading my thoughts. That lexer/parser I mentioned? I asked ChatGPT to explain parts of the code, and it did it perfectly, like I was chatting with the repo’s author.

A New Evolution in Programming

If you, reader, are Gen Z, you don’t have any memory of life without cell phones. I’m Gen X—I lived decades before using a mobile phone and remember what life was like with payphones on the street and a landline at home. I closely followed the impact of smartphones after 2008. It changed the world, made things a lot better, and it’ll get even better with AI.

AI assistants in programming are the same deal: there’s no going back—use it or become obsolete; adopt it or turn into a hermit living in the mountains. It won’t replace a developer, but we’ll use it throughout whatever we’re programming. If you work on the Linux kernel, you’ll use it sparingly. If you’re at some corporation, you’ll use it for everything.

Java programmers haven’t written constructor methods or getters and setters by hand in ages. It’s all auto-generated (thank you, Lombok!), and no one’s ever cared. An AI assistant like MS Copilot will help a ton with generating code, but we’ll still have to debug, write a lot of code, fix bugs, and so on. Plus, you often need to tweak and thoroughly test whatever it suggests or generates.

If you don’t memorize phone numbers, you rely on your phone for that. You’ll become dependent on AI in programming the same way you depend on internet access, running water, gas, and electricity. You rely on banks, credit cards, and supermarkets, and soon you’ll rely on a personalized AI agent. Life goes on...

There are still tons of opportunities to explore in IT, and there’ll be even more demand now that AI is “raising the bar.” We’ll see new programming platforms, new phones and computers (quantum chips!), and new professionals in demand, especially in development. Don’t worry about imposter syndrome—just focus on staying updated and knowing enough to critique and fix AI-generated code. Focus on your work, study what interests you, and don’t compare yourself to anyone.

Wishing you success!