t hasn't even been a year since Andrej Karpathy first coined the phrase vibe coding, but it's already led to a startup with a $6.6 billion valuation and is even starting to revolutionize the way we think about software and apps.

When you can vibe-code exactly the software you need in a matter of minutes to hours, it makes a lot less sense to buy software or apps that meet most of your needs but are missing key features or are imperfect for some of the things you want to do.

The caveat there is that you have to know exactly what you want and need. In many cases, the software helps you figure that out because it's often been shaped by industry best practices over the years. There will still be plenty of opportunities for software builders, but the quality bar is going to be a lot higher — because your customers now have the option to build it themselves.

This even applies to the world's most used piece of software: the web browser. AI coding company Cursor recently revealed that it used a team of AI agents to build a fully functional web browser named FastRender with 3 million lines of code in one week. The world certainly doesn't need another web browser, but this is a complex piece of software that would have previously taken months or years to develop. Now, you could develop a piece of software this month and then start over and develop a different one later this year when your needs change drastically.

And this also matters for consumers.

TechCrunch has a very well-reported story that highlights consumers vibe-coding their own apps:

• A student created a dining app for her and her college friends to pick places to eat together based on recommendations aligned with their shared interests.
• A startup founder made a gaming app for his family to play over the holidays, then shut it down after winter break.
• TC came across two people building podcast translation apps.
• A professional software engineer vibe-coded a planning app to help organize his burgeoning hobby for cooking.

The startup publication framed the consumer trend this way: "It is a new era of app creation that is sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for wide distribution or sale."