Just Vibe Code It Yourself

When I started Moolah, I built it as a vibe coded, but “serious” project. I spent time planning features, thinking through design and setting up systems to make sure it was high quality. That takes a fair bit of time and effort, so while it comes together faster than if I wrote it by hand, it still felt like a software project. For many things, that level of engineering isn’t required and you can truly build something that is just for yourself. By other people’s standards it would be AI slop, but because it is perfectly tailored to your needs, for you it’s great. That presents quite a challenge for the wide range of small development shops building high quality, but relatively small software. More and more, people really can just build it for themselves and get exactly what they want. It won’t out sell your product, but if enough people start doing it, you still wind up without any customers.

There’s plenty of software that’s still safe from this. Vibe-coding Microsoft Word or Excel would be pretty crazy. The basics generally work extremely well for people and they have a large depth of functionality that usually scratches whatever itch people typically have. Plus compatibility is a very big deal - a vibe coded word processor that either doesn’t support Word documents or renders them slightly differently is not generally useful. Free software also has an advantage because if it does what you need for free, why bother rewriting it?

The software I can see being most affected are the more niche products, often by indie developers. For example I use Paprika for tracking recipes - it’s very good but has a few things that I wish worked slightly differently. On iOS it’s priced pretty reasonably so I bought it there. The problem is, you have to buy each platform separately and the Mac prices are way higher than I’m willing to pay for it. That’s not a complaint really, the business model seems to work for them and I hope it keeps them in business. However, it makes me wonder if I could just vibe code a web based solution that, while probably way worse than Paprika overall, would work perfectly for me. The main thing that has made me hold off is that Paprika is very good at scraping recipes from any website and then being able to display it in a standard format - much easier for cooking with. Building that scraping code itself is hard, but shelling out to claude -p would probably do the trick just fine. Beyond that, recipe management is a pretty standard CRUD database app.

The thing is, a lot of software is a pretty standard CRUD database. At LMAX maybe 5% of the code was really smart, high performance, exchange specific code. The other 95% was just loading the resulting data, transforming it and spitting out a report. Moolah is just a database with a highly customised UI. My wife’s colleague vibe coded a system for tracking all the music student’s private lessons and the tutor’s time sheeting.

A lot of software that looks “big” and complex to replace is actually just a lot of smaller, simple systems hooked up together. And often augmenting that central system are hundreds of spreadsheets that are the inputs and outputs and that get tweaked to scratch the itches people have. Even those big systems are at risk of gradually being eaten by smaller, more personally tailored systems as people find they can solve their needs better with something they vibe coded. And they can generally still integrate with the bigger system because the UI was really all those spreadsheets anyway and they’re easy to generate.

There’s going to be a ton of security, reliability and accuracy problems with these new systems, but the reliability and accuracy are likely to get ironed out pretty quickly because the developers are the users and they’re the experts in their field. It’s the ultimate form of XP’s on-site customer. Security will be much harder to solve, but given how poorly professional software is holding up to AI analysis these days, maybe the answer to that is just good AI tooling and analysis, plus a few really solid foundational libraries.

It’s probably not the end of software development as a career, but it will certainly take a large chunk out of it. That’s a little scary, but as someone who go into programming as a hobby and then turned that hobby into a career, I’m kind of excited to see the true power of computing be opened up to a much broader range of people.