The problem (rather – my problem) with AI and vibe coding is that it's too good. Read 'til the end, or skip through this if you want, to get the prompt I used to build my latest project.
I'm not a developer. I don't really know how to code. Yet I'm building apps. A year ago, these apps crashed and burned. They never made it. But slowly, and surely, I managed to get some to work.
I feel like a fraud, as if I'm not supposed to have this 'superpower' I'm using. At my work, I help real estate agents out by conceptualizing business systems and processes that help them accomplish what they need to do. I'm here to make their life easier, because real estate sales can often be a challenging pursuit.
Before vibe coding came into existence, I'd help real estate agents use tools to build things such as digital marketing campaigns, lead generation programs, etc. Today, I'm building the tools I want them to use, to make their lives easier. And the process of building these tools just gets easier and faster.
Are you a Star Trek fan? Do you remember the cyborg episodes? Cybernetic organisms who dwell in a square shaped vessel? That's how I feel like – a human being, tied together – The Collective. Except here I'm tied to a massive coding knowledgebase, and everything I want to build… I can…
But this shouldn't be possible, right? Developers spend years of study to get to the point that they can build apps, alone or with a team, over the course of months, even years. I've been able to build some of my projects in a weekend. And when I say weekend, I mean four hours, or less, during a weekend – with additional hours spent on me just having OCD with how these apps work (even though Kory tells me to keep it simple).
So this is the insight I want to share today, as I slowly reveal the project I'm building.
What happens if this fairytale ends? If AI empowered vibe coding were to disappear, where does that leave me, and anyone else who has taken this thing on? Will we be revealed as the fraudsters we are? Do we go and hit the books and take courses on coding (which, admittedly, I have been doing)?
Yet what happens if this actually gets better? Today, a single individual can fully build an app, from concept, to prototype, to minimum viable product (MVP), to launch, to scale, as long as they know what they're doing, and they're asking the right questions. It has reduced the time to build something from months and years, to days… hours… even minutes. And that's as of today.
What happens when anyone can build their own app just by asking, and not have to deal with the nuances of token sessions, auth and integrated payment systems? What happens when you can build your own life-productivity app that does anything you need it to do? (And we're not even getting into a discussion about agentic AI yet.)
Here's the first prompt I put into Lovable to build the project I'm currently working on.
Create a real estate app using the repliers api -- for this app, the user can type in their address, and the app will create a process where it (a) shares available listings within x km (user can select this) radius from their address, and (b) shows sold listings -- the sending of availalbe and sold listings, and ui showing avail and sold listings data.
In four minutes and forty seven seconds, it built the first few functioning parts of an app that should have taken a few weeks to build from scratch.
It's a pretty basic real estate app, but the fact that one day any real estate agent can ask a vibe coding platform to build an app the way they want it to be built will be the superpower. At that point, though, the entire process of sparking real estate conversations and 'generating leads' could transform entirely.