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Vibe coding is dead. Long live actual coding.
We prompt-engineered ourselves into a corner. Now the market wants engineers again not prompt jockeys.
<devtips/>12 min read·5 days ago--
You ever ship a product nobody wanted?
Same. Specifically, a SaaS tool. I built it in a weekend. Cursor wrote 90% of it. It had a landing page, a pricing table, a waitlist. Looked genuinely good. Felt like cheating.
Nobody signed up.
Not because the idea was bad. Because the idea was everywhere. By the time I shipped, there were already six nearly identical tools on Product Hunt. Same gradient blob header. Same “seamless, effortless automation” hero copy. Same three-tier pricing. Same vibe.
That’s the thing about vibe coding it worked too well.
In early 2024, Andrej Karpathy dropped the term and basically handed every developer, designer, PM, and guy-with-a-napkin-idea a skeleton key to software. “Fully give in to the vibes,” he said. “Forget that the code even exists.” And we did. God, we did. Cursor blew up. Bolt.new launched. Replit got a second wind. A whole generation of builders who’d never touched a terminal shipped real products in real weekends. It was electric.
