Vibe Coding Is a Real Thing

Agentic AI coding tools are flattening the learning curve and unlocking a wave of new use cases

Vibe coding happens when you team up with an AI pair programmer, like Cursor or Windsurf (recently acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion). It’s far more than "autocomplete on steroids." These tools are genuinely agentic: you tell them what you want, and they generate the code.

Last year, I was already impressed when Microsoft’s Copilot started giving me accurate two-line code snippets just from written comments. The suggestions quickly got good enough that it became my main coding method.

Since then, newer tools like Cursor have taken this to another level. To see how much further things have advanced, I decided to test it on a real-world project, my new AI dashboard site: Takeoff Tracker.

I built the entire website in about 15 hours. Before this, I had never written JavaScript in my life (still technically haven’t). My background in R and Python helped, but not enough to fully explain how smoothly this went.

Even with my prior experience, I was amazed by the capability of the agent, which was powered by Claude 4.0 Sonnet (good job Anthropic).

Could a professional dev team build something better? Sure. They could add more polish and more sophisticated features. But it would take weeks and cost thousands, which means I wouldn’t have even attempted the project.

This isn’t a fluke. I think it’s a preview of what’s coming. As the barrier to coding drops, expect a Cambrian explosion of ideas that previously would have died on the drawing board. Many of them will be bad, but some of them will change the world.