Vibe Coding: Tearing Apart the Old World of Programmers

One Hackathon, Two Parallel Worlds

At weekend hackathons, a peculiar scene is becoming the norm: on one side, a senior engineer with ten years of experience meticulously refines a carefully designed system architecture diagram; on the other, a newcomer with less than a year in the field fires off natural language instructions to Claude or Cursor, delivering a fully functional MVP in just 40 minutes.

In the end, the latter gets more votes.

This isn't a joke — it's a real scenario playing out repeatedly at hackathons around the world in 2025. Vibe Coding — a concept coined by Andrej Karpathy earlier this year — is tearing apart the value system that programmers have upheld for decades, in an almost violent fashion.

What Is Vibe Coding? A Seismic Shift in Programming Paradigms

Vibe Coding, at its core, is strikingly simple: you no longer need to write code line by line — just describe what you want in natural language, and let AI handle the implementation.

The developer's role shifts from "code writer" to "intent communicator." What you need to do is accurately describe the product's functionality, interaction logic, and user experience, then let large language models generate the code, iterating through continuous dialogue to refine and improve.

Karpathy himself described it vividly: "I'm fully immersed in the vibes, embracing exponential growth, forgetting that code even exists — just seeing things, saying things, running things, copy-pasting things — and most of the time it actually works."

This sounds like blasphemy against software engineering. But the harsh truth is — it's working.

The Veterans' Dilemma: Has Experience Become a Liability?

In the traditional programming world, senior programmers had a clear moat: deep understanding of underlying principles, years of accumulated debugging experience, holistic command of system architecture, and engineering intuition forged through countless production incidents. These skills took years, sometimes decades, to develop and were considered irreplaceable "hard currency."

However, Vibe Coding has delivered an unprecedented shock to this value system.

Veterans at hackathons are discovering that their meticulously designed microservice architectures, carefully weighed technology choices, and rigorous error-handling logic — the professional qualities they once took pride in — have become "liabilities" that slow them down in 48-hour rapid prototyping competitions. The project skeleton they spend three hours building, a newcomer bypasses with three prompt sentences.

One ten-year veteran who has participated in multiple hackathons put it this way: "For the first time, I felt like I was competing in arithmetic using an abacus against a calculator. It's not that my math was wrong — the rules of the game changed."

This sense of rupture is spreading from hackathons to the entire industry. GitHub data shows that in the first half of 2025, AI-assisted code commits have exceeded 40%. In some startups, that figure surpasses 70%.

The Rise of Newcomers: Creativity as the New Currency

In stark contrast to the veterans' confusion is the meteoric rise of a new generation of indie developers.

Many of them don't come from computer science backgrounds. They include designers, product managers, content creators, and even high school students. They may not be able to hand-write a sorting algorithm, but they possess three things: sharp product intuition, clear communication skills, and proficiency with AI toolchains.

Under the Vibe Coding paradigm, the value of these three qualities has been dramatically amplified.

When code itself is no longer the bottleneck, what becomes truly scarce is: Can you identify a real need? Can you describe the product you want to AI with precise language? Can you make the right judgments and trade-offs based on AI-generated results?

A typical example: an independent creator with zero programming background used only Cursor and Claude to build a content management tool for a niche community in just two weeks, acquiring 500 paying users in its first month. When sharing his experience on social media, he said: "I don't understand code, but I understand my users. AI helped me translate my understanding of users into a product."

Creativity and user insight are replacing coding ability as the new currency in the indie developer world. And the accumulation of personal brand and IP determines whether these ideas can be seen and paid for by the market.

Divergence: Cognitive Restructuring of the New Developer Generation

The deeper change is that the cognitive and capability structure of the entire indie developer community is undergoing a fundamental divergence.

Type One: "AI-Native" Developers. They use AI as their core tool from the start, building their thinking around "prompt engineering" and "human-AI collaboration." They excel at breaking down requirements, managing the quality of AI output, and rapidly iterating products. Their competitive edge lies in speed and creativity.

Type Two: "Hybrid" Developers. They have a traditional programming foundation while actively embracing AI tools. They can deeply optimize AI-generated code and handle complex scenarios that AI struggles with. They are currently the most competitive group in the market.

Type Three: "Traditional" Developers. They uphold the craftsmanship of hand-written code and remain skeptical of AI-generated code. They still hold irreplaceable value in system-level development and safety-critical domains, but they are losing their voice in rapid prototyping and product innovation.

This divergence is not just at the skill level — it's cognitive. It comes down to a fundamental question: Do you define yourself as "someone who writes code" or "someone who builds products"?

In the world of Vibe Coding, code is merely one means of implementing a product, not the end itself. Developers who can make this cognitive leap, whether veteran or newcomer, will find their place in the new order.

Computing Power: The Invisible Chain

Yet, as we celebrate the democratization of technology, a more insidious divide is quietly forming.

The freedom of Vibe Coding is built on the consumption of computing power.

Every conversation with a large model, every code generation, every debugging iteration — behind each is a GPU cluster burning away. A project of moderate complexity, developed through Vibe Coding, can consume hundreds or even thousands of dollars in API calls.

For venture-backed teams or indie developers with stable income, this may not be an issue. But for the vast majority of ordinary developers worldwide — especially young people in developing countries — computing costs are becoming a new barrier to entry.

Ironically, while Vibe Coding ostensibly removes the technical barrier of "whether you can write code," it erects an economic barrier of "whether you can afford computing power" at a deeper level. The democratization of technology versus the oligopolization of computing power constitutes one of the most profound paradoxes of our era.

More alarming still, as developers form deep dependencies on AI tools, pricing power over computing resources effectively rests in the hands of a few cloud computing and large model providers. Today's API price wars may make computing power feel cheap, but no one can guarantee how long this "subsidy-fueled prosperity" will last.

When technical barriers come crashing down and creativity and IP become the new currency — computing power is the truly invisible chain.

Looking Ahead: The Old World Won't Disappear, but the New Order Has Begun

Tearing apart doesn't mean destruction. More precisely, Vibe Coding is redefining the boundaries and meaning of the profession of "programmer."

In the short term, Vibe Coding's greatest impact will concentrate on rapid prototyping, indie projects, and small-scale startups. In these domains, where speed and creativity far outweigh engineering rigor, AI-native developers will hold a significant advantage.

In the medium term, enterprise development will gradually absorb Vibe Coding methodologies but won't entirely replace traditional software engineering. "Hard constraints" such as security, maintainability, and compliance still require deep engineering expertise. Hybrid developers will become the most sought-after talent in the market.

In the long term, what truly determines the industry landscape isn't Vibe Coding itself, but the evolution of computing infrastructure and changes in pricing models. If computing costs continue to decline and trend toward universal access, Vibe Coding will truly unleash innovation potential on a global scale; if computing power remains concentrated in the hands of a few giants, then the beautiful narrative of "everyone can code" will ultimately be just another walled garden.

Cracks have appeared in the walls of the old world. For every developer, the question isn't whether to embrace change, but how to find your own irreplaceable position amid the transformation.

After all, AI can write code, but it still can't decide for you — what kind of products the world truly needs.