Ep 750: The Vibe Coding Boom: Why Vibe Coding isn't Going Away and How it's Both Good and Bad

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. Imagine that you can describe your dream house out loud and poof, a building appears in front of your eyes in minutes. It looks incredible. It's exactly what you asked for. And you move in. It's awesome. You tell everyone how easy it was. But then almost instantly you want to make some changes. You want to add a second floor hack, maybe even an outlet here or there or just maybe you want to hang a towel rack. But then you run into some problems instantly. You realize that no one knows which walls are load bearing or if the electricity works and turns out that those floors look sturdy. But when you plopped your couch down on those marble looking floors, turn that that they were kind of paper thin and they started to sink. And it turns out the whole structure was great in theory, but it was held together with duct tape, hopes and dreams and there definitely wasn't a permit. And now you're in trouble. And this scenario is exactly what's happening right now across the enterprise and the software industry at a scale that we haven't seen before because of vibe coding. But is all vibe coding bad? Is it all smoking mirrors and hallucinated code that's held together by strong models and agentic loops? Or can you actually vibe code a production ready app without much coding knowledge? Today we're going to be giving you those answers and breaking down the vibe coding boom, the opportunity, the potential crisis and why none of this is going away. All right, let's jump into it. Here is the big picture of what we're going to be covering on today's show. Because you can't escape the reality right now that AI has completely collapsed the cost of building software, but it's not all good. Right now it's estimated that about 41 to 46% of all new code written globally is now generated by AI. And right now the latest update that we've seen, which is actually a pretty old one is that 92% of US developers use AI coding tools at work every single day. But even Andre Capathy who coined the term vibe coding has now declared it passé after only one year. It's because we realize that it's not always all good. So on today's show, here's what we're going to be diving into and what you'll learn if you stick with us for the next 20-ish minutes. You'll learn the top 10 vibe coding platforms that you should be paying attention to and their main benefits. You're going to learn what happens inside AI build applications at the 90 day mark that triggers a billion dollar rebuilds. And you're going to know these specific strategies that separate vibe coding winners from the casualties. Let's get into it. Welcome to every day AI and our start here series. Yeah, after 700 plus episodes, I legit had no answer when new listeners would come in and be like Jordan, you have a lot of podcasts where do I start? Well, you start here preferably in order, but the start here series is the essential podcast series to both learn the AI basics and to double down on your AI knowledge. If that's what you're trying to do, make sure to go to start here series calm. That's going to give you exclusive free access to our inner circle community. It's the only way that you can get in right now. And that's going to pop you right in the middle of our start here series space there. And you can go back read, watch and listen every single episode in order all the way from volume one to today's episode volume 18. And if you missed our last episode, like I said, it's best if you listen to them all in order. And volume 17, we talked about the responsible AI playbook and what it means in five moves to ensure your AI strategy survives. And that leads us straight to today because if I'm being honest, one of the things that when you talk about AI strategies so many enterprises, new AI strategy is essentially vibe coding, right? Whether it's creating software for themselves or for their consumers or just vibe coding completely new ways to work internally. It's pretty easy. So if you are like, wait, can you hit rewind here Jordan? I'm brand new. I got you like vibe coding is this you describe something in plain English or whatever language that you speak and an AI builds software. Right. So it handles all the database, the deployment, the coding, even certain platforms handle the authentication payment platforms all of that. Right. So this is a term that open AI co founder, Andre Capathe coined in February 2025, which is crazy to think about because it seems like we've been talking about vibe coding for like five years, but it's been like 15 months. Right. And I kind of called this out a month before, you know, kind of the vibe coding terminology even existed in our 2025 AI predictions and roadmap series. And I talked about at the time that non technical people would be building themselves software by the year end. And I think that definitely came to fruition, but now fast forward into 2026 in the vibe coding platform has exploded in the scene. And there's that handful of even different types or categories of vibe coding. And like I said, this is an exploding sector. So you know, as an example, cursor right there in AI powered code editor and they've already hit two billion dollars annual recurring revenue in just a few months after, you know, their last earnings report. But most of the people fueling all of this growth are not even software engineers as well, or at all. So yes, you can have traditional software engineers or developers who are vibe coding and you've seen this as well. You know, some interesting, but kind of heart wrenching is the right word, right, but talking, you know, reading these articles about, you know, software engineers with 20 plus years of experience and they're like, wait, these AI platforms do all of this now at a much higher level better than I ever can. Right. So it's almost got to the point now where, you know, if people know what they're doing a lot of times experience software developers aren't even writing code anymore, right. If you look at Anthropic, which you could say is potentially the leading software dev agency the world, right, because their products, cloud code, cloud, code work are some of the best out there, right. They said they don't even write code anymore themselves. So first before we get into kind of the good, the bad ugly and why I don't think vibe coding is go away. Let's very quickly now that you have a basic definition of vibe coding. I want to talk about some of the 10 maybe of the most popular kind of vibe coding tools and they are in different kind of categories and these categories. Well, I define them. There's no exact definitions at the industry. It hears to and there's definitely a lot of crossover and you know, you can make a lot of arguments, but I'm trying to simplify it for our audience. That's beginning. So first, I'll say that we have the terminal or command line coding agents. So if you don't know what a terminal is, computers have a terminal and you can control your computer through the terminal, right. And it's becoming more and more impactful now as we see, you know, platforms very popular like cloud, code work that you can literally run things. On your terminal, right. So as an example, I always tell people, oh, I always have, you know, code X and quad co work running and people are like, tell me what you have doing, right. So as an example, I have quad code going right now. It's going through my 750 plus transcripts and I'm thinking about starting a new kind of episode series where I piece together multiple interviews that I've done. I've interviewed hundreds of people over the years. And I've always thought, man, it'd be cool to kind of combine, you know, have three different people older interviews, slice them together. You know, I can go in there and, you know, near right between. So I have quad co work as an example, going through all of those local files on my computer right now, doing some research for me at the same time and putting together some ideas that I'm going to go through and, you know, work with. So that's an example of a vibe coding platform, right, cloud code, cloud, code work using the terminal. So runs in your terminal, it can read your whole code base and make autonomous multi file changes. And this is also important to talk about before we get into these categories in the 10 most popular apps is it's not just for coders. It's not just for software development. Right. And I think that we'll start to see this probably in the second half or the very end of 2026. And I think it's not really going to become apparent until we get the new super app from chat, Gbt where they're essentially going to be combining chat, Gbt, their browser and codex because I've been saying codex is not really well, it is a coding platform, but it's so much more than that. So keep this in mind as we go through these even if you're not a software developer, a coder, right, I think it's important to pay attention not just to the rest of this episode, but to these 10 different platforms as well. So first, cloud code, I'd say it's probably the most popular and one of the most widely used kind of vibe coding platforms, although yes, it is much more than traditional vibe coding. So there's a lot of great new features that have been added. And again, depending on when you're listening to this, you know, so if you're listening to this in December 2026, you know, some of these new features aren't going to be very new, right, but if you're listening in April, right things like computer use auto mode, cloud, or sorry cloud, autofix for PRs, a lot of new things that have been released in cloud code. And I think this is kind of the terminal agent that just reads and rewrites your entire code base. Right? The other thing that I've liked recently is the new 1 million context window by default in Clawed Code. So by far it is broadly considered the current leader in a jet code quality and code base reasoning, but our second on the list here is catching up. So open AI's codex, you know, they recently announced that they have 2 million weekly active users in codex, which is pretty impressive for a product that's only been out for like less than two months, at least the desktop version. So this is kind of your multi service, multi surface agent system across the app command line, the IDE and the web. So you can use, you know, codex in a lot of places and kind of what's new or what's worth it is, well, the model. GBD 54, I'm always in codex using extra high reasoning. Yes, it takes a little bit longer, but in my opinion, right, if I'm running the exact same task in Clawed Code versus Clawed Code, it's going to be way faster and it's going to look way better, but usually codex is going to have way fewer issues, right? And that's the thing too with these coding, vibe coding platforms, you can work a lot of them in tandem, right? When I'm working, I usually have Clawed Code and Codex working on the same thing, not at the same time, you know, I might have one with kind of read only audit access, passing things over to the builder agents, but codex, like I said, the desktop app just launched in February. And one of the cool things that they've announced recently is the ability to run multiple sub agents in parallel. All right, there's a lot of other that might fit in that category of the terminal or command line interface coding agents, but I'd say those are the two big ones. Now, let's move on to the AI native code editors. So these are essentially full editors that are rebuilt around your AI. So these are for developers, probably a little bit more than even Clawed Code and Codex who want AI inside of their existing workflow. So the big one here probably is cursor. And this is kind of an AI first VS fork code with background agents and multi model support. That's the big thing right there, right, multi model support, whereas obviously, you know, Codex by OpenAI and Clawed Code by Anthropic run those respective models. So like I mentioned, cursor did hit 2 billion ARR in February of this year with over 1 million paying customers. And then you can use the best models, right? So you can use OpenAI's GPT-54. You can use Clawed Opus 46, Gemini 31, or cursor's own composer model. Next, Windsurf. So Windsurf went through kind of a weird middle of 2025. There's a bunch of these rumors, right? Oh, who's going to, you know, who's going to acquire them? You know, OpenAI was going to acquire them, but then they didn't, but then Google essentially acquired their CEO and some of their co-founders and then cognition acquired the rest of the company. But it is a great agentic IDE, right? And right now, that wild 2.4 billion acquisition saga. AI moves too fast to follow, but you're expected to keep up. Otherwise, your career or company might lag behind while AI native competitors leap ahead. But you don't have 10 hours a day to understand it all. That's what I do for you. But after 700 plus episodes of everyday AI, the most common questions I get is, where do I start? That's why we created the Start Here series, an ongoing podcast series of more than a dozen episodes you can listen to in order. It covers the AI basics for beginners and sharpens the skills of AI champions pushing their companies forward. In the ongoing series, we explain complex trends in simple language that you can turn into action. There's three ways to jump in. Number one, go scroll back to the first one in episode 691. Number two, tap the link in your show notes at any time for the Start Here series. Or you can just go to starthereseries.com, which also gives you free access to our inner circle community, where you can connect with other business leaders doing the same. The Start Here series will slow down the pace of AI, so you can get ahead. I may be skipped over a couple of definitions. I don't want to leave you all here with alpha bit soup, especially in our Start Here series. But what I'm talking about, I already defined vibe coding, command line interface CLI. That's essentially interacting with a vibe coding tool through a terminal, a different way to use the terminal. When I say an IDE, that's an integrated development environment. That's essentially a toolbox for writing computer software. It's a single application that combines all the essential tools that a programmer might need into one place. They don't have to switch between a bunch of different programs to get their work done. To simplify it, that's what an IDE is. Windcirc is definitely one of the more popular ones, but probably the most widely used one, even more so than cursor because of its paired is GitHub co-pilot. That's Microsoft's AI-powered co-pilot coding tool. This definitely is the broadest IDE support at the lowest premium price point because it's only $10 a month. They also have free tiers that give you 2,000 completions across all major IDE. This functions more as inline code completion versus the full vibe coding experience. Then you do have the option to have the enterprise version. However, we can't even talk about vibe coding. Well, number one, just because GitHub is the, I say it's like the online Dropbox. A long time ago, Dropbox was the big category for online storage. GitHub is the online storage for a lot of coding, but vibe coding platforms as well. Then Microsoft's GitHub co-pilot, their AI tool of choice there. Then last but not least, the biggest category here might be browser-based app builders. These are probably your more traditional fully vibe coding platforms, although the first two categories, you can vibe code anything from zero all the way to app in those other platforms. But I'd say the browser-based app builders are maybe a little bit more popular. This is your prompt to app platforms. You describe what you want in English and you get a working deployed application. I'd say probably in this category, lovable might be one of the more better knowns. This is essentially prompt to deployed full stack web app for non-developers. They have a new plan mode, which the thing has been pretty popular. That previews what the AI will build before writing any code. A lot of the other platforms have that, Cloud Code has it, Codex has it, etc. But that's really helpful, especially if you are using or paying for these platforms via an API. If you're plugging in your own, especially these multi-modal vibe coding tools, if you're using your API keys, some of them you just get a monthly plan and different models that are more powerful, use more credits. But sometimes you're just plugging in your API keys so they can get expensive. It is helpful to have something like the plan mode. Lovable also added recently built-in penetration testing, which is super important. We're going to get to that later on. That was kind of a first among vibe coding tools. Next, both that new. I'd say this is probably one of the fastest kind of paths from prompt to working prototype in your browser. I also know there's so many other vibe coding tools out there. A lot of them even have become more popular late 2025 or early 2026. That was kind of hard once they got to number eight. I probably had like six of them that could have been number eight nine ten. So a couple good ones were left off the list. But both that new definitely was probably one of the more popular ones in 2024. So this runs entirely in your browser using web container technology with nothing to install locally. They also have a great free tier plan. And I think this is best for speed demos and quick MVP's. Although a lot of users say that overall it's maybe weaker code quality than some of their competitors. Big name in this space, obviously, Replate. So that's their cloud IDE, combining an editor database hosting in AI agents. So they just launched the agent launch with 10 times more autonomy building apps across 50 plus programming languages. I'm a big fan of the the Replate agent. They also have effort based pricing that scales with actual compute and real time multi player editing makes it probably one of the stronger platform for learning and collaboration. Next, V0 from Versaille, probably one of the cleanest react and next JS code from any AI builder. So this generates production ready components. You know, using tailwind CSS by default. And this is kind of involved more into a full stack JS builder over time. And this is maybe the least lock-in of any platform because you can export standard react code that then you can fully own and use. All right. And then last but definitely not least. One of my favorites that I use probably the most right between codex, um, cloud code, uh, and then Google's AI studio, right? I do use, uh, Google's anti-gravity. That's another one that didn't make the list. But I probably use Google's AI studio a little bit more than anti-gravity just because I've been using it for longer and a little more familiar. And, uh, in March, Google did add anti-gravity agent supports, uh, inside Google AI studio, fire based [BLANK_AUDIO] and multi-player support there as well. And the cool thing, and the simplest way to explain this, well, it's the free, right? They have a great free plan, probably a better free plan than any of the others that I mentioned. That's a free full stack, buy coding platform, power, buy everything Gemini. So you can literally in like five minutes, you can create a, you know, your own version of something like Nettle Banana, right? And then make it, you know, specialized for your niche, right? Obviously, if you're in your app, if you're using any of Google's, AI, you do have to, you know, provide an API key to power that, right? It's not like you can just use Nettle Banana for free, but you can literally create your own version of any of Google's, you know, AI. And like I said, they do have a generous free tier and the team over there at Google AI Studio, probably of all of them, aside from maybe Cloud Code and Codex kind of, you know, those two and then Google AI Studio are just getting so many updates so quickly. All right, so now you know the big tools. You just need to know that this is a growing industry and it is not going anywhere. If you thought vibe coding was gonna come and go and it was just gonna be some trend, no, because vibe coding is turning into vibe working and that's where everyone's going. I mean, even just look at Microsoft, right? Look at some of the things that they've introduced recently, like their Microsoft code work, which is powered by Clawed Codework, right? So essentially a vibe coding platform, you know, Microsoft actually has a couple of others, but you know, it's coming to the common knowledge worker, right? And these platforms are growing quickly. So, but there's an issue because right now, a study shows that 63% of vibe coders have never even written a line of code, right? Themselves, which is it makes sense, right? Because yes, you do have experienced developers and you know, people maybe with a little bit of a crossover or background in software development using these, right? And maybe it's allowing them to work in a language that they've never written before, but you know, it kind of started with, okay, people, you know, using this maybe they're, you know, more commonly web developers and then they're using it to, you know, launch React apps or something like that, but eventually it's turned into well, you have people who don't know what code is using these. And these are builders that are just making quick prototypes, they're literally trying to replace enterprise software entirely. And it's actually happened, right? So you have all these stories of like, okay, yeah, you can go vibe code something and use it. That's cute, right? But you're never gonna, you know, replace an enterprise piece of software. Well, companies have, right? I mean, we'll check in with them and see if that's successful, but you know, one kind of famous example is, hopefully I get this company, right? A ton of them, they're head of finance built a full CRM on lovable, reportedly in three hours that they used to replace their $40,000 sales force contract, right? Zendask's product team cut prototype timelines from six weeks to three hours, right? So obviously you have a lot of vibe coding platforms where product teams or software development teams have gone from, you know, timelines that were multiple months to well, less than a day because of vibe coding. So I do think it's a very powerful tool when used by people who absolutely know what they're doing. But just as the market is reaching this, everyone's vibe coding developer trust in AI code is just collapsing, right? And that's why there's a huge downside to just vibes, right? And going back to that, you know, my little analogy at the beginning of the show, right? If you could just talk, you dream home into existence, but you walk in and, oh my gosh, the floors are sagging. That's the risk that you run because it's not all good. Yes, if you know what you're doing, vibe coding, obviously is a not just a game changer in terms of what companies can produce, right? Companies that already had software development teams, but companies that didn't, right now, will suddenly they can offer new products, new services, new revenue streams to their current clients and customers, right? But it doesn't always work out well because if you don't know what you're doing and you still push something to production, it's obviously extremely problematic. And that's one of the reasons why trust has gone well down. So a stack overflow study show that confidence in AI generate code actually dropped from 43% to 29% in two years. And one of the top frustrations for developers was that AI solutions are almost, right, but not quite, right? It's almost like, you know, there's more than, you know, one way to write a specific piece of code, right? There's more than one way to design a certain website. And sometimes what we've seen, and maybe this is, with some of the companies trying to get more token efficient and not necessarily get things right, again, that's why at least for me, sometimes I personally prefer, you know, using, you know, codex GP-D54 extra high. Yes, it's way slower, but it seemingly gets more things right with fewer issues, right? But that's one of the biggest problems right now. Is sometimes it might seem like an AI coding app will, you know, the floor. Hey, visually, it looks right if we make a cardboard floor or paper thin floor, but it's not going to function correctly, all right? And I think the industry realized that it was hopelessly hooked on a tool set that it did not actually trust. Because AI doesn't really care too much, at least by default, about security. That has changed a little bit in 2026, but 2025 was a straight-up security nightmare, right? From AppSec Santa 2026 study showed that out of 534 AI code samples, about 25% had confirmed security flaws, right? That's a very high percentage. So if you don't know as an example, you don't know how commercial plumbing works in your, you know, VideCoded House, you're not going to know that those AI built pipes were paper, right? Good example of this, which is notebook, right? So that was an AI built social network for AI agents. Well, accidentally exposed 1.5 million API tokens from one database misconfiguration. So this is just examples of what can happen if, well, especially as we talk about agent coding and agents coding in loop with sub agents autonomously, right? It's a little different when you have an experienced human kind of launching the code and testing this out. But when we go straight up agentic, I think that's where we start to run into issues. And when it starts to get, you know, a little bit different, you know, kind of the prospect of demos over memos, I don't think anyone will necessarily complain about. And I do think that's where we're headed. And I think that's why if you're even a non-technical builder, I think in the future, it's like, no one's going to want to deck. No one's going to want to an email. They're like, just, just build me a demo of this now, right? Because you can do this, right? I've actually done this before on calls, right? Someone will be talking about something and be like, here, I just built this. Is this what you're talking about? But if you don't know what you're doing, maybe it's just a demo, right? Maybe it's not something for production, because that's where you will run into issues. And another thing is, well, it just generates code so fast, right? Newer models, once you get over the thinking, the chain of thought, and it wants to start spitting out code, it goes so quick. So studies show that fewer and fewer experienced developers are actually reading the code that AI outputs, right? Some of the more famous developers of the last couple months or quarters have said that they don't even review the code. You know, it was Peter Seinberger, so the OpenClaw creator who was hired on by OpenAI. So yeah, if you don't know OpenClaw, it is the most popular piece of open software, open source software, literally ever. And he famously said, or maybe infamously said, I ship code, I don't read. And he's not alone, right? Most, you know, you've seen these stories from some of the head devs at Anthropic. People are just saying, yeah, I don't read the code, right? Maybe it's they have a lot of confidence in whatever product that they're using, because they're also building it. But it's kind of like if a conveyor belt was craved to 10x speed, and you still just had one quality inspector that's just holding a clipboard, right? It's seemingly as the AI tools get better and smarter, more efficient. Well, it seems like, well, we just trust them more. And when engineering teams can't keep up with the amount of code that spit out, you know, frustrating employees just start building software entirely on their own, right? And I'm talking about that manually, right? More and more people as we start wanting AI, and we know what's easy, some engineering teams that are still doing AI kind of maybe just code AI assisted and not totally vibe coding. Well, they're backed up, right? 'Cause now all of a sudden, company software stacks have doubled or tripled, right? And what's this led to? Well, it's. Also IT sprawl right it's it's AI sprawl so now you have Code going into production made by people who maybe shouldn't be Deploying code live, but this is also an issue right because engineering teams that are still maybe doing things the Quote and quote older school way or just using AI code assist or AI code completion and Australia vibe coding right the demands on them are way more in You know non-technical people are just taking this into their own hands so I always want to Talk about this because I think it's important. I do think that vibe coding will Quote and quote destroy traditional software engineering jobs, but I think overall this is going to be a Eventually a growing field because there's gonna be a whole new category of work that did not exist before and I'm talking about rescue engineering. So here's this kind of this 90 day this three-month Kind of realization so engineers are calling this the three-month black box effect This is essentially when an AI build architecture becomes untouchable, right? This is when the house right that you went in and built after 90 days. You're like wait. I forgot everything about this No one knows which walls are low bearing the AI forgets how it built the foundation everything stalls right? So this is what we're seeing from developers. They number one Everyone's creating exponentially more code and then we have things like humans are forgetting things. I don't know if you've realized this Pre-AI I I think I was smarter right I'm not saying that I'm Dumber now I just feel I'm less able to retain information Because I am now with AI right with a gentigai. I'm consuming Way more information than I was previously which means I'm forgetting things faster and it's seemingly this is a Kind of turning into a global problem where after 90 or so days right software teams are just kind of forgetting not just that But then also yes over the last couple of weeks month or so Context windows in these programs have gotten better. Yes, but still some of the you know apps that were built You know six months ago and it took a while to get it approved But it's been live and now people want updates. Okay. Well, we're way past the context window the human forgot the AI forgot infrastructures changed Right, and maybe the code was shoddy to begin with so this has led to a completely new Category of work which is rescue engineering and I think this is one of the hottest new disciplines in tech So studies have shown then estimated 8,000 startups now need full or partial rebuilds or refactors of their entire code base or apps And those can go anywhere from you know 50,000 to 500,000 to a couple million dollars, right? You have a lot of AI startups that essentially buy coded a very popular platform They just started stacking duct tape on top of paper clips on type of glue and then they just realized oh my gosh We just realized that our app. It's wildly popular. It's exploding and it's built on Popsicle sticks, right and they're having to go through and completely redo it so How do you avoid kind of the fake dream house and build a solid foundation with vibe coding? Here is how you can do it correctly. I think first you have to come to the realization that this is permanent Right and even if your team may not be vibe coding right now you will be by working right using something like Cloud code Or sorry, cloud code work using something like Microsoft co-pilot code work Something like the you know, whatever the codex Chatchipit super app becomes this is going to become very common where we are going to be using natural language to build little apps Right, maybe it's to build apps to finish our work faster. Maybe it's to build apps for consumers Maybe it's replacing little pieces of software updating pieces of software Not technically people are going to be doing it so you need to follow these rules But also you need to understand the companies riding the waves without governance are going to pay for that rescue engineering and the brief in the breach cost But the company's treating AI coding as a rigorous engineering Kind of problem With human oversight are going to capture the real value Because like I said this technology is not optional But how your organization governs it is entirely your choice. All right I hope this one was helpful taking a quick-ish look at the vibe coding boom and why vibe coding isn't going away And how it's both good and bad. All right, should we do more vibe coding right let me know Uh, I'm always on the on the fence about this right especially from a podcast perspective I'd like to have something for you all that you can just kind of listen to in your car You know listen to when you're on the treadmill walking your dog whatever it is and not necessarily have to be watching something on the screen at all times So if we should be covering more on vibe coding let me know but if this is helpful You're definitely going to love the rest of our start here series remember this is kind of made to listen to in order They're shorter episodes. All right, so make sure you go to start here series.com That's going to give you free access to our inner circle community And you can go listen to all of the episodes in order So thank you for tuning in hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI. Thanks y'all And that's a wrap for today's edition of every day AI. Thanks for joining us If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating It helps keep us going For a little more AI magic visit your everyday AI.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time