Vibe Coding is DEAD?

Here's the graph that they produced. I don't know about you, but this is a suspicious drop for Lovable. Almost like something happened. Either they weren't they started not reporting on certain data or they stopped a certain marketing spend or they fired a certain marketing team or something. So on the hill you see 35 million uh these are like 35 million users on the site monthly, right? Yeah. Yeah. And now it's settled to around 20. So you know which is a crazy number because we know like there are roughly 45 million developers out there. Uh there are probably more designers by the way probably. more designers. Well, when I say more designers, I don't mean like necessarily like Figma designers. I mean like in on a broader sense, anybody who would doodle something on the computer. That was probably because of the design joy thing. That was such a great marketing because that's the thing. Love are great at marketing. They're not the best tool, right? They just look nicer and they just their their personal online personality is great. But that design joy battle that they did, you know, beating web flow, I think that really opened the doors to a big audience, you know. Yeah. The trend shows that lovable is dying. Is that true? I think there lovable is dying is just the clickbait guy. It's this guy's article, by the way. Um, and he basically goes he talks more about the broad idea of of vibe coding and whether vibe coding is dying. Obviously, it's a very exciting prospect for people who don't know how to code to now suddenly be able to code, right? Or or not even code. Sorry, they don't care about coding. That's that's the key point in all this. They don't care about coding. They just they just want their product. And I think that is such an attractive proposition for anyone. But saying all that, we're talking about vibe coding and is it is it dying, right? I don't think it's dying. I I think it's just the hype's just dying off. Like people get excited. People want to try things. Like there's this wave of people that get really not offended, but they get really um like uppety about the fact that people are jumping on a new and exciting tour. It's like what do you expect? like people want to see if it's right for them. People want to see if it does this and that and the other. So, you're going to get an influx of users that explore this stuff. And sometimes this just takes a little while to figure it out. Like, you're not going to I think about, you know, if you got kids, um, which you do, you know, your your kids are probably going to want, oh, dad, can you buy me this paint set? Or, "Dad, can you buy me this science kit?" and you're like, they're going to you're going to get it for them and they're going to pick it up and they're going to play with it once and then they're never going to see it again because it's just not for them. But you you've got to allow them to explore that, you know. So, and and sometimes they'll do it'll take them three months and then they'll move on to the next thing. You know, this is this is kind of what we do. I don't know what people kind of expect with all this sort of stuff. So, I think that people have thought, okay, I can build tools. Realistically, I think they're probably coming to the terms with the fact that it can only go as far as prototyping and even then your app is at risk of probably getting hacked or something like that. Like I said, it's still a big responsibility. They lovable have sold you the dream of building whatever you want, but the reality of actually getting there is slightly more involved. This is like an awesome uh thing to note and to mention that the idea of building an app, it's different from like actually building an app because when you have a prototype like we built, you built a prototype for you know a potential client and you did it in probably a few days, right? Yeah. But we we we're thinking like that the actual app is going to take probably what six months minimum, right? I don't know. I'm I'm I'm quitely I'm quietly confident but you know it won't take a day you know it won't take a few days at least. It takes significantly more like order of magnitude more. That's the point. It's order of magnitude more from prototype to final product. Even though the prototype might resemble like 90% of the product at the first glance, like you look at it and you're like it's 90% there, but that just looks like that that that extra 10% that you don't see is much more difficult to handle. And also there are like a lot of more like edge cases and like special use cases that you have to cover and that might require like rethinking the entire thing. So yeah, building apps is not that easy. From what I see, um this is like contributing uh to the diff world in a positive way. So regardless of people staying or not staying with lovable, the fact that more people come to lovable try to build a product I think is a net positive. Yeah, even if they get frustrated, they see okay like building an app is actually difficult because there are so many like as you said like UX and other points that people don't see and once you get into it you get you will have some appreciation for how difficult it is to build apps and also for for the ones who you know decide that it is not for them they will gain that appreciation and they leave that That's fine. That's a net positive. And for the ones who come in and they started, you know, doing it and they fall in love with all that details and all that things that you need to build, which it because it's not easy. So if it's not easy, it's probably, you know, sometimes it's worthwhile trying it. And um I think a lot of people will graduate from lovable. This is something we wanted to talk about. And they they become developers and that is also a net positive. So all in all together this is net positive for the dev world and I'm really happy about that. Yeah. And also you know those people who did gain that appreciation it might be not only gaining an appreciation but you might be gaining a client because they're like I tried vibe vibe coding this thing and I couldn't do it. So can you help me please? You know so I can't fix your vibe coded app. Yeah. Yeah. I I I mean I mentioned this before, a client of mine, they delivered kind of like a prototype of the website that they want they wanted us to design and build for them in Webflow. They delivered it us to us in Lovable. So they used Lovable to get a kind of like a it it was a prototype. It was kind of like a wireframe. They were like, "Oh, we thought like we want to have like three boxes to explain this part of the the copy." And the copy was also written by the AI from Lovable and that was not final, but it was something that they could start with. It was funny. They could use Reum as well, but you know, people used Lovable because they are just so known. So, I bet that was better for you as well because it's like, cool, we can see what we need to build. Much easier to to slap down a fixed price on something when you can actually see what it is you're building. You know, you still might get it wrong, but it's, you know, people expect you to fix price something. You literally have no idea what they want to build. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.