Recently I was filming at the London x SheBuilds on Lovable event for International Women’s Day. I’ve had brief experience with Lovable previously, but being in a room full of ‘vibe-coders’ really opened my eyes to the potential of these tools. Today, I’ll be doing a deep dive into what this looks like for the future of web and app development.

What is Vibe Coding?

The term, coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, refers to the process of generating applications or sites entirely through natural language prompts, rather than writing code manually.

Instead of spending hours, days or weeks building an app, you can instead input phrases such as “Build me a portfolio website for my creative digital agency, ‘withjamie'” and it will do just that! Then you can go in and edit certain parts using an AI agent, and have a ready-to-launch product within minutes.

Who Offers Vibe Coding?

Vibe Coding as a buzzword is only a year old, so I’m sure that we are yet to see the true scale of the industry, but currently the industry leaders are:

• Lovable: the most popular. As of March 2026, there are 200,000 new projects made daily. You can test it for yourself by simply going to their website, and typing in your prompt right away.
• Claude Code: excels at understanding context and fixing errors. Claude’s rise in popularity (link article) could see Claude Code becoming the industry standard for vibe coding in the near future
• Replit: commended for its superior flexibility, native backend/database support, and autonomous debugging

What is the difference between Vibe Coding and Manual Coding?

Speed

Vibe coding is much faster, often quoted as up to 5x faster, and often sees same-day development. On the other hand, manually coding an app can take many months.

Accessibility

You don’t need to have any coding experience in order to begin Vibe Coding. On the other hand, you need years of experience and expertise in order to excel at manual coding. That being said, having a basic or intermediate understanding of the basics of coding will help you in the process, especially when it comes to debugging.

Reliability

Manual coding is more reliable because you have full control over every line of code in your apps. Whilst most Vibe Coding platforms allow you to directly edit code, there is still an added risk to control, security and scalability.

Vibe Coding is also prone to bugs and breakages, so many recommend hiring a developer to debug your platform before it goes live to ensure it is safe and secure. This further shows how it is useful to have coding experience when vibe coding.

How is Vibe Coding affecting developers?

Like many developments in AI, there is a lot of online discourse about Vibe Coding putting developers and coders at risk of job instability, by boosting prototyping speed in a way that simply cannot be replicated by a human.

However, the security risks and significant flaws often produced by vibe coders mean that developers are often brought in to debug and review a project, making them still a vital part of the development process.

In truth, developers aren’t currently at risk of losing their jobs to AI, but they are seeing a shift in the scope of their work from creation to debugging. This is unlikely to change anytime soon, as AI is currently not very good at self-diagnosing.

The speed of Vibe Coding has put pressure on developers, as there is now increased demand for quick results, with people wanting them sooner, sometimes regardless of quality.

Developers can leverage Vibe Coding for their projects, achieving similar results much faster. Developers are in a stronger position than many in utilising this tool, meaning they can create higher-quality results with fewer bugs. However, there has been discussion about the risk of developers becoming ‘lazy’ or losing their ability to code as they’re not working directly with code as often.

The Developer Disparity

With the rise in demand and popularity for Vibe Coding, there may be a future disparity between developers who are well-versed in Vibe Coding and those who are still taking a more traditional route. Companies may begin to hire for a hybrid role, with strong requirements in having knowledge and experience in both, which may put some developers at risk of job loss.

Prompt engineering is becoming a skill on its own, even outside of Vibe Coding. Knowing how to instruct an AI agent in the most efficient way is not as simple as it sounds, so developers who can do this well are going to be in a stronger position than those who can’t.

The risk here is that the next generation of coders may lack foundational knowledge, which could have rippling impacts long-term. This could see a decline in app/website quality in some future areas. Not only this, but this could pose significant security risks if coders are not taught how to look for breaches such as SQL Injections, and how to accurately mitigate them.

What is the future of Vibe Coding?

Vibe Coding is likely to dominate more and more over the next few years. Developers may move more towards guiding AI agents rather than writing code manually.

We may see an increase in poor-quality apps and websites due to the accessibility of Vibe Coding platforms and the ease with which they can be put out to the world. This could pose security risks and loss of data if poorly maintained.

However, Vibe Coding provides a space for people to be creative and bring things to life they couldn’t otherwise have. At the Lovable event, I met people who had no coding experience and brought ideas to life that they thought would never leave their heads, which I’d argue is very inspiring.

In the right hands, Vibe Coding can be a powerful and helpful tool for development across many sectors, but the industry would also benefit from regulations and guidelines to prevent ‘slop’.

For now, Vibe Coding is better for smaller-scale projects, especially if you don’t have any coding experience. If you’re considering learning to code, I would still recommend it, as it will greatly benefit your Vibe Coding journey and coding career. If nothing else, it’ll prevent you from having to pay for a developer to debug your code for you. Why not give it a go? Good luck!