When anyone starts trying to vibe code on a project for the first time, it's quite typical that after typing something like "build me a project management app with a nice dashboard and user authentication" they become amazed on how with just such a simple prompt they can see in front of their eyes a fully functional application assembling itself. And not only that, but also the app buttons work, the overall layout looks clean and they can actually click around in it quite properly. The whole thing took just a couple of minutes and without the need of writing a single line of code.

That feeling is now happening, it's real and the market has rewarded it if we just look at the numbers and realise that vibe coding tools have attracted over a billion USD in venture capital in 2025 alone. Lovable, a well known platform we've written about before and that was funded by a simple Nordic young guy, hit 200 million USD in annual recurring revenue. Cursor's parent company was valued at 9,2B USD, with Bolt hitting 2,1B. With this data at hand, we can clearly see that these are not just experimental tools with a handful of geeky users.

As we approach the end of May 26, in this exact moment approx 60% of vibe coding users are not developers. So yes, as mentioned in the title, almost anyone can build an app now, but the question that we hear less often is: What kind of app exactly? What happens at the parts the demos never show?
Let's start by giving credit to the sides that deserve it, because the capabilities are impressive in ways that of course matter a lot.

To start with Bolt.new, this platform runs entirely in the browser through WebContainers technology that requires no installation, no local setup and even no terminal. You simply describe an application in plain English or Spanish and it generates and runs the code live. Designers who have never opened a terminal are building prototypes in it right now.

v0 from Vercel had 2 million users generating React components and full landing pages from just text descriptions by the first quarter of this year alone. Lovable targets full stack web application generation with Supabase as the default backend, and has become the mandatory tool for people who want to test an immensely valuable thing as whether an idea is worth pursuing before spending money on a development team.

The productivity numbers for experienced developers using these tools are also real, with some statistics saying that AI coding tools have boosted individual developer output by almost 80% on average, measured by lines of code shipped. GitHub Copilot now has around 2 million paid subscribers and 20 million total users, and approximately 40% of all code written in the world today has become AI generated.

The workflow used by many in the industry is also quite common, with most starting with Bolt or Lovable to prototype fast, and then moving to Cursor or Claude Code for production level refinement. And this is absolutely changing how software gets built today, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

All those tools and ways of coding have brought to a way easyer, much quicker and incredibly cheaper reality things like rapid prototyping, idea validation and internal tools. And that is a meaningful democratization and definitely not hype.

Now, having said all of that, we should also explain the part that the product walkthroughs reliably skip, and we should understand that getting from 0 to 90% of an app might be quite easy with vibe coding, while getting from 90% to 100% (handling edge cases, authentication that doesn't have vulnerabilities, payment processing, real deployment, production database design, or error states for every scenario a real user will eventually stumble into) is where things get complicated in ways that simple prompts don't easily resolve.

Karpathy himself, the man who actually invented the term "vibe coding" and is maybe among the most technically capable person you could imagine using these tools, discovered this very early when right after building his own app with vibe coding, he wrote that it was "exhilarating and fun as a local demo but a bit of a painful slog as a deployed, real app". So if Andrej Karpathy himself finds the last 10% a challenging part, it's worth sitting with that for a moment.

The security picture is also worth looking at, and just about a year ago, in May 2025, a study found security vulnerabilities in 170 out of 1.645 apps built with Lovable (apps that real users were actually using and trusting with their data), and some critical security flaws were also identified on Lovable's generated code. These are not random and lonely cases, but are more of a structural consequence of using tools that optimize for getting something working quickly rather than getting something secure reliably, and we should be aware of that.

Several developers who have tested these platforms on stress and at scale have also noted the same pattern, reaching to the conclusion that vibe coded apps work fantastically well for prototypes but "have patterns you will regret at scale" They basically experienced that the code that gets you to a demo often makes your life way harder when you try to grow beyond it. Not because the app is bad, but because it was simply not designed with growth in mind, it was designed to exist.

Very interestingly, a study published mid last year found that while AI coding tools boosted average developer output by 76%, experienced developers using AI assistance were paradoxically 19% slower than when they worked without it (even though those same developers believed they were working 20% faster, according to the study)
The explanation for this is what actually matters, because it was found out that those experienced developers knew when the AI had gotten something essentially wrong. When that happened, they just stopped, backtracked, rethinked the structure and catched the vulnerability before it shiped. And it was that process of oversight and correction that was taking a lot of time, a time that didnt show up as productive in metrics but absolutely shows up in whether the application works correctly in production.

This paradox captures something essential about what expertise actually does in software development, because it clearly shows that it is not primarily about being able to write code, but about knowing when the code is wrong, why it is wrong, what the consequences of that wrongness will be six months from now and how to fix it in a way that doesn't create three new problems. A non technical user prompting Lovable has no mechanism to do that check because he lacks expertise, and when they see something that appears to work they just ship it. The problems arrives later in security audits, in production failures, in scaling walls and in technical debt that accumulates invisibly until it becomes impossible to ignore.

The honest synthesis and the conclusion we can extract from all the above is that vibe coding tools have created a true new capability tier that didn't exist only three years ago. Today, a small team or even a single person with limited technical experience can build and validate a product idea at a speed and cost that previously required a full engineering team, and that matters a lot for founders, for product teams or for internal tooling at companies that can't justify a dedicated developer or a team of developers. But that capability tier has a ceiling, and that ceiling arrives at the moment when the product starts to matter, when real users are depending on it, when security vulnerabilities have real consequences and when the architecture decisions made in the first minutes sprint start constraining everything that follows.

We live in a tech phase where the companies that use vibe coding tools most effectively treat them for just exactly what they are, basically extraordinary tools for speed and validation, but not replacements for engineering basis. Those companies know that the prototype gets built fast, but then it must be the professionals the ones who arrive to evaluate whether the foundation is worth building on, refactor what needs refactoring, harden what needs hardening and design the system that will actually scale.

This is also, frankly, why specialized software development companies have never been more relevant rather than less. The market is now full of beautifully looking products built by excited non technical teams who got to 90% faster than ever before and are now staring at the 10% that requires actual expertise. And the demand for that expertise at the moment, applied to real production systems, is actually higher than it has ever been.

For development firms that know what they're doing, the era of vibe coding is not a threat but a pipeline, and many creative entrepreneurs can today just set up very quick and cheap companies to develop apps at very low costs and relying on experienced subcontractors for the more technical side of their initiatives.

As a brief of the above explained tools, we could brief as follows:

1- For non technical guys or teams out there validating an idea, Lovable and Bolt.new are the clearest starting points. Both run in the browser, require no setup and can produce functional full stack applications from natural language descriptions within minutes. Lovable handles more complex app generation and Bolt prioritizes raw speed and is excellent for proof of concept work.

2- For teams with some technical experience who want AI assistance in a real development environment, then Cursor is the most interesting tool, valued at around 9 billion for reasons that are obvious the first time you use its Composer feature on a complex codebase.

3- GitHub Copilot remains the most widely adopted AI coding tool overall, with so many people around the globe as paid subscribers and integration across every major IDE.

4- For frontend and UI generation specifically, v0 from Vercel produces React components of a quality that impresses even experienced frontend developers.

And for anything that will carry real user data, handle payments, operate at scale or be built to last beyond the initial prototype phase, our strong recommendation is to keep bringing in people who have done it before, because the most clear thing the vibe coding era has clarified is not that developers are becoming obsolete, but that getting something working and getting something right are still two meaningfully different things. One of them is now much faster than it used to be, and the other still takes what it always took. Time and knowledge.

Vibe Coding, la nueva forma de desarrollar software

GPT Images, designing without designers

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Luis Yanguas Gomez de la Serna