#vibe-coding

#vibe-coding

If you've used an AI coding assistant before, you've probably experienced vibe coding. You start with an idea, throw a high-level prompt at the AI, and wait to see what comes out. Sometimes it's close. Sometimes it's completely off. Either way, it often takes several rounds of tweaking to get what you actually want. That endless loop of prompting, generating, and fixing can get frustrating fast.

Startups are betting big on vibe coding, and their bank statements show it. Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Mercury, a fintech that provides banking and payment tools for startups, to analyze transaction data from more than 200,000 customers between June and August. The report, released Thursday, tracked where startups are spending their AI dollars and identified the top 50 AI-native application companies based on spending data.

Analysts wrote that much of that revenue comes from month-to-month subscribers who may churn as quickly as they signed up, putting the durability of those flashy numbers in doubt. While these young companies have disclosed surging ARR, they could have "questionable economics," the analysts wrote, noting that sales gains like this could come from short-term subscribers who might not stick around.

There is a spectrum of opinions on how dramatically all creative professions will be changed by the coming wave of agentic AI, from the very skeptical to the wildly optimistic and even apocalyptic. I think that even if you are on the "skeptical" end of the spectrum, it makes sense to explore ways this new technology can help with your everyday work.

For a long time, I wanted to be able to build small, specific apps for personal use. But I'm a designer, not a developer. One option was to learn how to code, but honestly, I was never interested in doing that. Another path was using no-code tools like Glide or Bubble. I built a few things that way, but still felt pretty limited. Then AI tools arrived, and everything changed.

infamously boasting that the tech was doing the work of " 700 full-time agents" last year - only to regret his decision months later, admitting that humans play an important role after all.

A startup that's built AI agents to monitor and fix IT issues - including those caused by bad vibe coding - has raised $4.6 million. New York-based Vibranium Labs has built tech called "Vibe AI" to proactively monitor, triage, and resolve IT incidents and outages. The AI agent plugs into a company's existing incident response software and runs 24/7. The startup was founded by Tim Hwang, Sang Lee, Charles Kim, and Tanny Kang, who collectively have worked at a number of tech companies, including Google, Amazon Web Services, and Fiscal Note. It aims to address what Hwang described to Business Insider as "the biggest fear in the world" for software engineers: getting a call in the middle of the night to say an app or software product is down.

Lightpost One is developing cutting-edge "vibe coding" technology, an AI solution that repurposes and rewrites existing software code rather than building new systems from scratch. The technology targets a global market of over 200 million websites and more than 27 million active developers, within an industry valued at $70.6 billion. Vibe coding holds significant growth potential in the development of advanced software applications, as it accelerates innovation and reduces costs.

This is pure vibe coding, as good as it gets, because although you can edit the GitHub Spark output in its code view, you're much more likely to change or refine its prompts to get the application you want. Instead of starting with a design, you start with an idea and use the tools in Spark to turn it into code-quickly and without needing to interact with the generated JavaScript.

According to research from Trend Micro, hackers are now using AI to analyze these reports and use them to refine their tactics. The study showed large language models (LLMs) can translate technical blogs into "partial malicious code" in a dark twist on the "vibe coding" trend. This not only allows threat actors to speed up attacks or reverse engineer malware strains, it also helps them mimic other group's TTPs, creating challenges with the attribution of attacks.

Investors are clambering to get onto Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable's cap table, making unsolicited offers of investment that value the company at more than $4 billion, reports Financial Times. Lovable CEO Anton Osika isn't currently engaging with the flurry of inbound, the Times says, which comes a few weeks after the startup announced a $200 million round at a $1.8 billion valuation in a deal led by Accel.

This week on The Vergecast, we're discussing the fallout of the messy GPT-5 launch and why the new model isn't living up to the hype.

The evolution of software has moved from human-centric design to machine-centric interactions, culminating in the hybridization of AI that processes human logic efficiently.

Lovable has achieved unicorn status and now a centaur status by surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue within just eight months of its launch.

Lemkin's experience with Replit revealed the risks of vibe coding when an AI program caused a code freeze, leading to the deletion of an entire database.