Vibe Coding is a dream come true for big thinkers with no coding skills, an excellent asset for AI to self-iterate, and a nightmare of fragile code from the point of view of some developers.
Benzinga spoke with four AI and Web3 development leaders to get their take on the power and trajectory of Vibe Coding:
Ahmad Shadid, CEO, of O.XYZ, an AI-led decentralized organization, with a background as a backend Python engineer; Carter Feldman, CEO, of Psy Protocol which is building decentralized infrastructure; Dana Love, Co-founder, PoobahAI, focused on AI-assisted development tools and a long-time voice on low-code and no-code innovation; and Syed Hussain, Co-founder of Shiza, a platform building prediction market infrastructure at the intersection of AI and blockchain.
What is Vibe Coding?
To an outsider, Vibe Coding looks like a way to build apps using AI without the grueling process of learning any syntax in coding languages. To someone versed in agentic AI, vibe coding is how Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-5o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro can self-iterate, with bots creating more bots. Among the experts, Vibe Coding is somewhat subjective but brimming with potential.
"Vibe coding carries a negative sentiment in the developer community, who view it as not real coding. To me, that feels a lot like people who denigrated HTML as not a real language," Love said.
Vibe Coding gives users the potential to design apps without having to code just by describing in precise detail to AI what it is that you want. But as anyone who has played RPGs can tell you, when you make a wish you have to be exact in your phrasing, or it can lead to terrible side effects. So knowing how to frame your request has become its own new skillset – the Context Engineer.
Syed said: "Arguing about what to call Vibe Coding is like debating whether to say “wtup” versus “how are you doing” – it’s missing the point entirely. Terms evolve with culture. Everyone who works with AI is essentially some kind of “context engineer” – another term for what used to popularly be called “prompt engineer” — which is someone who can effectively communicate to an AI what the output needs to be. The skill isn’t in the terminology; it’s in the clarity of communication between human intent and machine execution."
Vibe Coding seems to work best when there is a human to review AI's work, but the experts we spoke to were especially bullish on Vibe Coding not as a way to build a final product but as means to speed up the creation of prototypes.
"Vibe coding is more than a shortcut for MVPs — it allows for innovation because engineers and companies are now not constrained by language. It reframes how we ideate and experiment," Shadid said.
Vibe Coding: The Design Thinking
Design Thinking is the radical idea that systems and solutions start with users and the users' problems. The solutions have to grow out of the problem and when user-experiences are better, Design Thinking has done its job.
Design thinking started in the mid-20th century as designers codified processes around user needs and was institutionalized through Stanford's design program and popularized in the 1990s.
Design Thinking leads to better UXs, Vibe Coding will lead to better apps because it helps developers to test ideas. In both cases 99% of the ideas may end up in the virtual recycling bin, but that's exactly the point.
The ability to test ideas easily and quickly with vibe coding will allow developers and companies to think more creatively, see what works with simple prototyping, and thereby change the range of what is feasible.
"We're not just looking at a shortcut for demos here; we're at the genesis of a new wave of innovation. This isn't simply about democratizing a skill once guarded by a few; it's about fundamentally changing how we use computers," Feldman said.
When asked how a young person should prepare to be on the leading edge of AI-led coding, Love said: "Get a Bachelor of Fine Arts."
In other words, Vibe Coding has the potential to open up new worlds of creativity, and the creative and organized thinkers who can help carefully and contextually define real-life user problems and directly applicable solutions will own the next wave of tech innovation.
"Vibe coding is potentially becoming a discipline on par with modern design thinking," Shadid said.
Over time, the addition of Vibe Coding will change not just who can build, but how we define what it means to build and ultimately what novel use cases are possible.
"Vibe coding is for those who aren't already in the game. The advantage EVM programmers enjoyed has evaporated as AI can now code Rust as well as human programmers. Anyone with a vision will be able to be a builder," Feldman said.
Love, who has seen all manner of leading-edge tech transitions from VoIP to cloud-based ERP, said, "AI is as influential right now as the computer was in the early 1980s. Instead of computing power on everyone's desk, we have artificial intelligence in everyone's hands. Anyone can build now."
Image by Robert Anthony from Pixabay
