Vibe coding: 1 Year on

It’s the first year anniversary of “vibe coding”, coined by legend @karpathy.

I was super hyped about it a year ago:

Imagine this:

It’s the year 2050. You wake up to the sound of your AI alarm, calculating the sleep cycles to the minutes, waking you up at the right time.

The first thing you check is the outputs from the army of AI agents that were coding and reasoning about through the night for your latest startup idea. You see it’s already done, coded out in full stack from frontend to backend. Ready for you to just greenlight it.

YOLO, you think. And hit the glowing green button to launch. What’s the worse that can happen? Your army of AI agents can continue to fix bugs and iterate on it.

You are just washed up and making coffee when you get a notification that your marketing plans are ready. A full report on how to SEO, keyword difficulty, search volume, social media channels to sign up for, influencers to work with, etc. The full works. Your AI agent proceeds to brief you in the voice of Scarlet Johansson, how to get to the top of SERPs. You approve and ask it (Her) to provide updates every week.

A Stripe notification comes in. $10,000 MRR and climbing.

Things are going gooood.

And you’ve not even finished your morning coffee yet.

What’s changed, one year on, if any?

I built 8 projects and 12 plugins last year with vibe coding mostly. Small interventions here and there, but mostly just blindly trusting the output and asking the LLM to fix things if it broke. Space Defenders was notable because I recall really pushing the limits on that one. That was a time without Claude Code. Can’t imagine how much easier it will be now. It’s 10x easier to build tools and software.

And this year, agentic AI is really coming into force. That vision of army of AI agents building through the night is already possible.

But making money? Not for me yet. Not sure if anyone is making big bucks from their AI army… yet. But not a stretch to imagine that is possible in the next decade. Lest 2050!

But when the lowest common denominator rises, and everyone has these tools, competition increases too. Making money might get even harder. I’m seeing many designers, creators, getting into vibecoding and building stuff where they could not previously. I can definitely feel the heat. In the end, it might come down to things like marketing, personal brand, virality. Not code.

So the winners are yet to come.

Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.