Vibe Coding: Ushering in a New Era of Personal Software
For decades, software development has been defined by its barriers: technical expertise, resource constraints, and the sheer time required to turn an idea into a functional product. But something has changed. Over the past few months, I have built various applications—from Chrome extensions and utility drawer widgets to WCAG-compliant login screens and fully functional Android apps. All this while balancing a demanding full-time job and completing an MIT course. How? Through what's being called Vibe Coding—a process that I believe is fundamentally reshaping the relationship between creators and software.
What Is Vibe Coding?
I have been using and writing about generative AI as a creative partner—collaborating in an intuitive, iterative, and conversational way—Vibe Coding is no different. It is an extension of this same co-creative process, where AI enhances and accelerates the act of bringing ideas to life. You are not writing thousands of lines of code; you are prompting, shaping, and refining outputs until they align with your vision. In many cases, a working prototype emerges in minutes, not days.
With AI models now capable of understanding natural language requests and translating them into structured, executable code, the constraints of traditional development cycles are dissolving. This shift means that software creation is no longer confined to engineers. It belongs to designers, strategists, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a vision for a better user experience.
The UX Implications: A Window Into User Intent
For a UX designer, Vibe Coding offers something invaluable: an unfiltered glimpse into how people naturally conceptualize information and interaction design. Historically, product teams rely on user research, interviews, and behavior analysis to infer what users might want. Now, with individuals rapidly prototyping their own interfaces, we can see firsthand how different cohorts instinctively organize and interact with digital spaces.
Consider this: What happens when people build their own APIs into custom UIs? What patterns emerge when non-designers craft interfaces to suit their specific workflows? Given the ability to ‘vibe code’ their way to a working app in under 30 minutes, what does this tell us about the future of interface personalization? About Design Systems? About color? About
The implications are profound. Instead of dictating UX patterns from the top down, we will begin to observe emergent, bottom-up design language—one shaped not by best practices but by actual user instincts. We may find that different user groups, given the same problem, instinctively gravitate toward similar UI structures. Or we may see entirely unexpected solutions arise from outside traditional design paradigms.
The Future: Personal Software at Scale
We are on the verge of a shift where software is not just something you use but something you shape. Vibe Coding is democratizing software creation in ways that feel inevitable—like the early days of blogging or video creation. Just as platforms like YouTube and TikTok allow people to craft and distribute their own stories, AI-driven development will empower individuals to build micro-tools, automate workflows, and tailor digital experiences to their exact needs.
Other than the library of ultra-customized software that I'm building (I can finally have my calculator with a built-in Celsius to Fahrenheit toggle), what excites me most is how Vibe Coding aligns with a broader shift in creative collaboration. Just as generative AI has transformed how I approach writing, ideation, and design, Vibe Coding removes traditional friction from software development, making it an intuitive and iterative process. This fundamentally changes how humans interact with technology—not passive users but active co-creators of their digital experiences.
Short-term, I anticipate a surge in personalized micro-apps, built to solve particular problems that traditional software would never address. UX designers will learn from these emergent patterns, observing how users instinctively organize information and workflows when given the freedom to create on their own terms.
In the long term, Vibe Coding could redefine the UX profession itself. As more users become fluent in crafting their interfaces, our role will shift from dictating best practices to analyzing, curating, and refining the most effective emergent design patterns. Design systems may evolve to accommodate modular, AI-generated components that dynamically adapt to user intent. We may even see the rise of AI-augmented UX researchers, leveraging vast libraries of user-generated interfaces to identify what truly resonates with different audiences.
In a world where software is increasingly co-created, our responsibility as UX designers will be to amplify the best of what users build—turning their instincts and ingenuity into scalable, refined experiences. Vibe Coding is not just a new way to develop software but an entirely new way to design, learn, and engage with technology. And we are just getting started.
Vibe Coding is not just a faster way to build. It is an entirely new way of thinking about software. And we are just getting started.