Anyone Can Cook

Image by Samir Kharel

With the introduction of OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor’s IDE, and Anthropic’s Claude Code, building apps and tools has become significantly faster, cheaper, and more cost-effective. Vibe coding is the process of building software by utilizing LLMs. Instead of you building the app yourself, you build a prompt for the LLM, and it edits your code to match the requirements you feed it. 

Now, the reason Vibe coding has become such a hot topic is because of the time it saves when building a product. Before, you’d have to design, code, test, deploy, and, lastly (the hardest part), market the product so you’re in the black on revenue. The reason Vibe coding has exploded isn’t philosophical–it’s economic. What used to take 1-2 months to design, build, and ship an MVP can now be done in 4-7 days.

These are the pioneers of vibe coding: 

Cursor is an AI-powered IDE (integrated development environment) built from VS Code. You can prompt the AI to build, test, or plan a feature, click the tab to autocomplete code, and highlight code to make simple changes. Built in 2022 by MIT graduates Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, Cursor officially launched in 2023 and became the fastest-growing startup of all time, growing from $1 million ARR to $100 million in roughly 12 months. 

Codex is OpenAI’s software agent, which, instead of living inside your editor, lives on the cloud and can work on multiple tasks simultaneously. Through ChatGPT’s sidebar, you can assign it tasks like researching features, fixing bugs, or creating marketing strategies. With each task taking about 1-30 minutes, Codex is built for delegation, not collaboration. You hand it a task and come back, similar to how you’d interact with a coworker. 

Claude Code was released by Anthropic–an AI research lab founded by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and other former OpenAI researchers. Instead of living inside an IDE, Claude Code lives in your terminal and acts like a junior developer. You give it a goal, and it’ll research, study your codebase, edit files, run tests, and commit changes itself. Claude Code reportedly holds over half of the AI coding market, making it the dominant force in the AI coding space. Cursor’s primary LLM options for users are Anthropic-developed models: Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, Claude Haiku, and more. 

Contrary to any belief about programming and software engineer roles becoming obsolete, engineers in this age are more important than ever. Steve Jobs, a pioneer of modern technology and design, once said, “A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.” This quote is impactful because even though there will be hundreds of thousands of vibe-coded apps and engineers, the ones who will win will be the ones who have product knowledge, know how to break a problem down, and have unrelenting determination to win. 

The code is free; your thinking is what has value. 

However, building is only half the battle. The other half is where most people give up. Now that much of the technical aspect of building something has been reduced, you still need to create something people want, and then make sure they know it exists. The advantage of this new era in consumer products is that the person with the best idea wins, not the person who has the biggest team or the deepest pockets. 

The developer who couldn’t afford a cofounder, the average Joe who had this great idea but no technical skills, the person who had the perfect solution but no way to design it–they can all ship now. 

The playing field has never been this level. The only question is what you’re going to do with it.