Z's Q: What is vibe coding like? My A: Depends on which tools you try. My answer is to continue to test all of the vibe coding tools and "traditional and modern" IDEs that have integrations to AI technologies.
Z's Q: Does it live up to to the hype? My A: It's never good to follow the hype. Best is to see how technologies and tools can enhance your development skills and target projects.
Z's Q: How will this change the way programmers work? My A: technologies have always been advancing and software engineering has continued to advance (methods, modeling, patterns, agile, CI/CD, modern AI...)
Z's Q: What will be the impact on SaaS companies? My A: modern architectures, solutions and companies will continue to be impacted in real time by technological advances.
Z's Q: Should you wait for the dust to settle or start using AI now? My A: watching the parade pass you by will keep you as part of audience on the sidelines.
Here's a blog post about one of my recent experiences in the use of "modern AI" for development. It's 2 months ago and already at least a year out of date :(
This is a realistic and very balanced article. I wish more people were writing about AI like this, and spending less emotional energy on the hype or doom of it all.
Your point that it is a higher level abstraction rings true for me. Almost all of the code I’ve shipped in the past year has been with the help of AI. Knowing what to build is important, and providing the right guidance to the LLMs as well if your goal is maintainability / scalability.
I don’t see SaaS dying anytime soon. Several of my own SaaS subscriptions I would say have doubled in value in the past month as they’ve released MCP features which let my LLM of choice programmatically read from them or make updates / changes to them.
For instance, this week my LLM evaluated my onboarding flow in code, then instrumented events for us to track in analytics, and once I shipped those events, it created an entirely new dashboard in my analytics platform to track the funnel metrics for onboarding to identify bottlenecks to tackle next. All in about 15-20 minutes of hands on work that I know would have taken weeks of cross team coordination at previous companies.
Im doing similar things with my email marketing platform and my SEO platform as well.
I don’t know where the future takes us with these new capabilities, but I know for myself that I am doing increasingly sophisticated work in areas I just would have skipped for lack of time before. I think smaller, faster moving teams have an even bigger edge over incumbents than ever before if they can leverage these kinds of abilities.
I've been on a deep dive into Vibe Engineering since last June. It has been a journey of discovery, frustrations, and exhilaration. Since Dec, when Opus 4.5 was released, my tool of choice (bolt.new) has, as my AI sidekick, helped me explode on the quality and results of the prompts it helps me create, and the source code generation it achieves.
But we can't let all this empowerment get to our heads. We must check what it does and guide it with a firm hand. I am practicing highly controlled prompt management with clear, precise, and verifiable instructions.
Do this, and I not only believe, but I also know, the possibilities are endless ... and I can do it myself in weeks, without hiring a 5-10 person development team to code the same thing over many months.
Be warned: the simpler the prompt, the more hallucinations occur. Eliminate instructive gaps.
You must put in the effort to create fully descriptive prompts to get repeatable, quality results.
The 'giving someone a puppy' analogy for internal tools is spot on. Building is the fun part; feeding, walking, and cleaning up after it is where people underestimate the effort.
Z's Q: What is vibe coding like? My A: Depends on which tools you try. My answer is to continue to test all of the vibe coding tools and "traditional and modern" IDEs that have integrations to AI technologies.
Z's Q: Does it live up to to the hype? My A: It's never good to follow the hype. Best is to see how technologies and tools can enhance your development skills and target projects.
Z's Q: How will this change the way programmers work? My A: technologies have always been advancing and software engineering has continued to advance (methods, modeling, patterns, agile, CI/CD, modern AI...)
Z's Q: What will be the impact on SaaS companies? My A: modern architectures, solutions and companies will continue to be impacted in real time by technological advances.
Z's Q: Should you wait for the dust to settle or start using AI now? My A: watching the parade pass you by will keep you as part of audience on the sidelines.
Here's a blog post about one of my recent experiences in the use of "modern AI" for development. It's 2 months ago and already at least a year out of date :(
David I.
Forgot the URL - sorry - https://blog.davidi.com/2025/12/07/using-modern-ai-to-create-a-working-solar-system-text-adventure-multi-device-application/
Thanks David! Great answers. The rate of progress is indeed fast.
Cheers!
This is a realistic and very balanced article. I wish more people were writing about AI like this, and spending less emotional energy on the hype or doom of it all.
Your point that it is a higher level abstraction rings true for me. Almost all of the code I’ve shipped in the past year has been with the help of AI. Knowing what to build is important, and providing the right guidance to the LLMs as well if your goal is maintainability / scalability.
I don’t see SaaS dying anytime soon. Several of my own SaaS subscriptions I would say have doubled in value in the past month as they’ve released MCP features which let my LLM of choice programmatically read from them or make updates / changes to them.
For instance, this week my LLM evaluated my onboarding flow in code, then instrumented events for us to track in analytics, and once I shipped those events, it created an entirely new dashboard in my analytics platform to track the funnel metrics for onboarding to identify bottlenecks to tackle next. All in about 15-20 minutes of hands on work that I know would have taken weeks of cross team coordination at previous companies.
Im doing similar things with my email marketing platform and my SEO platform as well.
I don’t know where the future takes us with these new capabilities, but I know for myself that I am doing increasingly sophisticated work in areas I just would have skipped for lack of time before. I think smaller, faster moving teams have an even bigger edge over incumbents than ever before if they can leverage these kinds of abilities.
Thanks for your article, Zack!
I've been on a deep dive into Vibe Engineering since last June. It has been a journey of discovery, frustrations, and exhilaration. Since Dec, when Opus 4.5 was released, my tool of choice (bolt.new) has, as my AI sidekick, helped me explode on the quality and results of the prompts it helps me create, and the source code generation it achieves.
But we can't let all this empowerment get to our heads. We must check what it does and guide it with a firm hand. I am practicing highly controlled prompt management with clear, precise, and verifiable instructions.
Do this, and I not only believe, but I also know, the possibilities are endless ... and I can do it myself in weeks, without hiring a 5-10 person development team to code the same thing over many months.
Be warned: the simpler the prompt, the more hallucinations occur. Eliminate instructive gaps.
You must put in the effort to create fully descriptive prompts to get repeatable, quality results.
Cheers,
Dale
The 'giving someone a puppy' analogy for internal tools is spot on. Building is the fun part; feeding, walking, and cleaning up after it is where people underestimate the effort.
Your PSA about not pushing to production without review deserves more than a footnote. I wrote the full checklist for exactly that: https://reading.sh/your-vibe-coded-app-works-now-ship-it-properly-80b98f77ec25?sk=cabfc3bc74dee0495f0772382bd9a70e