Vibe coding is a real job now

• More people are vibe coding full-time without knowing programming languages.
• Some vibe-coding platforms like Lovable are hiring professional vibe coders.
• Vibe coding can pose challenges if gaps in technical knowledge lead to rickety software.

Lazar Jovanovic trained as a forestry engineer and has never written code.

So, when he sits down to build software, he doesn't open an editor and start churning out syntax. He begins by describing what he wants to build to an AI tool.

Before joining the vibe-coding company Lovable, Jovanovic oversaw operations at an online marketplace. His latest job title: vibe-coding engineer.

As Jovanovic sees it, his work isn't all that different from traditional software development because he's still building. At Lovable, part of his job is to show customers how easy the tools are for nontechnical users.

"The skill is no longer writing code," Jovanovic, 36, told Business Insider. "The skill is ownership, clarity, judgment, taste, subject-matter expertise."

Vibe coding is getting more attention because just about anyone can do it to build useful software. Now, people like Jovanovic are turning it into a full-time job, while others are vibe-coding their own apps and becoming entrepreneurs.

Sam Schneidman is head of community at Base44, which lets users build software with natural-language prompts. He said he expects vibe coding to produce a new professional class of creators who want to develop apps yet aren't fluent in languages like Python or Java.

The era of vibe coding is "great for the ideas person," he told Business Insider.

A dozen apps in five months

Antoni Tzavelas, who lives in Toronto, began his career as a fashion designer. When the industry faltered, someone told him how much money he could make in tech. So he went back to school to study systems administration.

Tzavelas eventually became a cloud computing engineer, later a DevOps engineer, and, down the line, moved into coaching software development teams.

Even while he progressed through seven career transitions, Tzavelas, 51, said he never learned to code. Then a friend introduced him to vibe coding.

"That took everything that I've ever learned from every single role and brought it all together," Tzavelas told Business Insider.

He said he has since built a dozen apps in five months. One of them is a tool he developed in two days that analyzes conversations to help users improve their connections with others. Now, Tzavelas is the cofounder of a startup called MiruPulse, which aims to commercialize the app.

Vibe coding, he said, brought him the "ultimate joy of doing a job that I just love every single morning."

A buildup of 'judgment debt'

Tzavelas said that while it's easy enough to build a basic app with vibe coding, turning it into a reliable, "battle-tested" system that a large company could rely on would likely require a deeper understanding of how IT systems work. That could be a problem if you are trying to turn your idea into a business that has legs.

Another challenge that entrepreneur Alibek Dostiyarov sees in vibe coding is the buildup of "judgment debt" — a pernicious accumulation of decisions that occur when AI alone constructs the technical scaffolding of software.

Dostiyarov, who has a background in software engineering and consulting, told Business Insider that the process can let flaws slip through, and over time, those can become like cracks in a foundation.

He is the cofounder of Perceptis, which develops AI-powered software for professional services firms.

Dostiyarov said that, more than ever, companies need to prioritize sound human judgment when developing software. Vibe coding has its place for testing ideas and prototypes. That's about as far as he is willing to go.

"There is no world that I can imagine in the near future where we'll be just saying, 'OK, now that we've tested it, let's just integrate it directly into our system,'" Dostiyarov said. Instead, he said, a vibe-coded prototype would need to be rebuilt by trained engineers.

The tools are changing fast

Vibe coding sometimes gets a bad rap among industry veterans, Adam Janes, a fractional CTO, told Business Insider.

"It's a very touchy subject for devs, because they like to think that they have this real expertise," he said.

Yet Janes thinks an opportunity exists for people who are experts in an area to become professional vibe coders because they can pair their knowledge with AI's technical wizardry.

Because AI tends to either over-engineer or under-engineer a problem, Janes said, technical expertise is still a big help. Even so, as AI continues to improve, vibe coders could find it easier to develop robust software, he said.

"Three months ago, we were talking about a completely different world," Janes said.

Will Wilson, CEO and cofounder of Antithesis, an autonomous software-testing platform, told Business Insider that he's witnessed a similar shift since the arrival of models such as Claude Opus 4.5 last year.

Their emergence marked a tipping point, he said, though bottlenecks remain. Wilson said AI coding tools can spit out so much that it becomes "astonishingly hard" to review and ensure it won't "blow up your business."

With vibe coding, he said, "the burden all shifts to testing and reviewing the code and making sure it works right."

There aren't good estimates of how many professional-level vibe coders are out there, though AI is taking on larger chunks of coding, even in traditional engineering.

Articulating what AI needs

For Jovanovic, there's no going back. Before Lovable hired him, he said he built dozens of apps — including one for journaling and one to track his jogs near his home in Sarasota, Florida.

It took Jovanovic about a year of vibe coding to go from enthusiast to employee. The toughest part of the job, he said, is articulating what he needs so AI can build it.

Jovanovic still gets goosebumps when he thinks about the first time he built an app.

"This feels like the thing that I was born to do," he said.