For the past several months, my social media feed has been flooded with people bragging about spinning up apps and websites over a weekend without any engineering help or coding — with just vibes.
Vibe coding is simply using regular language to describe your intentions to an artificial intelligence bot, which then generates the code.
I was intrigued, but I brushed it aside as just another fleeting internet moment like NFTs and metaverse farmlands. Also, trying vibe coding felt like self-mockery because I was the kid who learned coding in school, only to abandon it for writing stories about people who were building businesses by writing code. I learned just enough coding to pass the exams. I never built anything and hadn’t even thought about coding in about a decade.
As a tech reporter, watching random strangers build “products” overnight felt unfair because I have seen many entrepreneurs go through the grind of Africa’s broken infrastructure, scarce capital, and endless bureaucratic headaches to achieve even a little success.
But then a friend broke me.
