I was at the park this morning. A bunch of kids were skipping school and playing football, and at one point they booted the ball way off. I happened to be nearby, so I ran over, took a swing at it - and sent it even further away. One of them yells at me, “What, are you off your head?” Cheeky little rascal, ditched school and all. Anyway - that’s more or less the vibecoder’s attitude toward the professional programmer.
The vibecoder’s confidence isn’t entirely misplaced
The vibecoder is now convinced they can do everything a programmer from the old, bygone days could do - old farts like me and plenty of others. And in part it’s true. They really can do a large chunk of what a programmer does, in far less time, and with a whole extra arsenal: creativity, the ability to sell, to distribute, to spark interest, to actually understand what’s needed. All skills that developers have traditionally neglected.
But there’s a big gap sitting right in the middle. It’s the gap around the consistency of that software, and around security.
Where the emails are coming from
I’m starting to get the odd email here and there: “Hey Piero, I’ve vibe-coded this whole thing, I’m selling it - could you take a look and check whether it’s actually solid?”
So people vibe-code something, and then they go looking for someone to hand the hot potato of security and software responsibility to - a programmer, paid, obviously. Which means it’s something you can package as a service.
If I were hunting for a market niche to move into, I’d honestly consider throwing myself at exactly this. Become the person who takes on the responsibility of hardening the thing and fixing up the vibe-coded mess - and charge hard for it.
The bottleneck has moved
This ties back to a point I made a while ago about bottlenecks in productivity and in the world of work.
Until now, the bottleneck was the production of code - the writing itself. Now the bottleneck isn’t producing code anymore, because almost anyone can do that. The bottleneck has shifted, and it’s become validation and security.
There’s also a bottleneck further upstream: once you can build basically anything, what do you actually choose to build? You have to be far more deliberate about picking what’s worth doing.
So there you go. Send this video to a friend who vibe-codes, and I’ll see you next time.
By the way - Cheshire Cat 2 is out. You install it with a copy-paste straight into Claude. You don’t have to do anything: there’s literally a copy-paste on the homepage to install it, and it’s built specifically to be vibe-coded. Cheshire Cat 2 is designed entirely on that principle - you don’t have to look at a single line of code if you don’t want to.