Vibe Coding Is Real and It's Changing Who Gets to Build Software

Last month a friend texted me a screenshot of a working SaaS app he'd built over a weekend. Stripe integration, auth, dashboard — the whole thing. He's a product manager. Hasn't written a meaningful line of code in years. He vibe coded it. If you haven't encountered the term yet: vibe coding is when you describe what you want in plain language, let an AI generate the code, and iterate by feel rather than by understanding. You're not debugging. You're directing. The code is a black box you trust to work until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you ask the AI to fix it. The reaction from engineers is predictable. "It won't scale." "What happens when something breaks in prod?" "He doesn't actually understand what he built." All true! And also kind of missing the point. The capability floor just moved For 30 years, building software required a specific kind of literacy. You had to understand control flow, data structures, how requests and responses worked, why certain things were slow. That