Vibe Coding Just Hit the Dictionary

Howdy, seems like AI ‘bit news/crazy hype’ is slowing down which is good. Seems like it’s “build time”. And definitely also “agent time”.

If you are not sure where AI, building with AI, AI agents are going, check out the star growth of OpenClaw on Github. I’ve been playing with this for a while. Pretty incredible, but I think I went too deep, too quickly with 10 agents who are basically a bunch of semi-useless rabble who can’t yet really get stuff done. I need a bit more tweaking I think.

Here are a few things I found recently:

Collins Dictionary just named "vibe coding" their Word of the Year for 2026. Not "AI." Not "agentic." Vibe coding, the practice of describing what you want in plain English and letting AI write the code.

A year ago this was a nerdy tweet from Andrej Karpathy. Now it is a $4.7 billion market projected to hit $12.3 billion by 2027. Ninety-two percent of US developers use AI coding tools daily. Forty-one percent of all code written globally is now AI-generated.

I have been testing the latest crop and honestly, the leap from even six months ago is wild.

Bolt.new - type a prompt, get a full app. Seriously. It is almost comically easy. Best for quick prototypes and MVPs. Free tier is genuinely usable.

Lovable - designed specifically for non-coders. The UI guides you through building full-stack web apps. If you can describe what you want, you can build it here. $17M in ARR and growing.

Replit Agent - browser-based, deploys instantly. Great for people who want to go from idea to live app without installing anything. Zero setup.

Cursor - this is the power tool. More for people who want to understand and control the code. A billion-dollar company now with over a million daily users.

Claude Code - what I use. Direct, powerful, steep learning curve. Works well if you want to understand what is being built, not just generate it.

And this week, Anthropic dropped Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 - bigger context windows, better reasoning, fewer hallucinations. The engines behind vibe coding keep getting better.

My choice/recommendation —> Claude Code! Absolute beginner/prefer a UI, try Replit.

I am not going to pretend this is all sunshine.

45% of AI-generated code fails security tests. The code looks good. It runs. It has vulnerabilities you will not catch unless you know what to look for.

Technical debt is piling up. Companies are shipping vibe-coded MVPs and not cleaning them up. The $1.5 trillion technical debt problem Fast Company reported on is not slowing down.

Relying entirely on AI without understanding what it is doing is a trap. You will ship something, it will break, and you will not know why.

The sweet spot? Use vibe coding to get 80% of the way there fast, then invest in understanding (or hiring someone to review) the critical 20% - security, data handling, scaling.

The people who are going to get burned are the ones who treat this like magic. The ones who will do well are the ones who treat it like a very fast, very capable contractor who still needs oversight.

Your Turn

Open Bolt.new and paste this:

Fill in the bracket. Hit enter. See what happens.

Weekly build logs from a 25-year program manager who codes with AI.
— Brett

👉 Hit “Reply” and share your experience — I read every one!

_{Picture by xxx on Unsplash.}