Table of Contents
I was off social media for a couple of months — I’ve been busy building projects with vibe coding. I’ll admit that at first, I wasn’t fully convinced by the idea of delegating coding tasks to an agent. As I was building tools, games and full-stack web and mobile applications, I was impressed by the ability to create and deliver applications so fast. I even started cancelling my subscriptions as I am replacing them with the solutions that I built with the agents.
I am Alice in Wonderland. With Claude, I’ve built games, game engines, portfolio trackers, IDEs, text editors, and much more — all on a twenty-dollar Claude subscription. The more I vibe-coded, the more I ran into token limits, but they never stopped me. I’d wake up the next day, pick up where I left off the night before, and let the agent keep working for me.
During these intense times of vibe coding, I’ve often questioned my approach to building software. Having trained as a professional software engineer over years in the tech industry, I find it astonishing to watch an agent build applications so effortlessly. Yet I quickly realized that software development would never be the same again. Twenty years ago, at the very start of my career, I’d occasionally browse job listings to gauge the skills I needed to build. Today, the skills to build software have given way to the skills to manage its building.
Yet the question isn’t whether I can build applications quickly — it’s whether I still control what I’ve built. That’s the root of the anxiety and upheaval. A working tool is never enough if we don’t understand what’s inside it, because either we want ownership of the product, or we’re expected to have it. That’s the shift we now have to reckon with: we’re no longer builders, but managers of the creative process.
I’m building — replacing my off-the-shelf software subscriptions with tools I build myself, designed exactly the way I want them to work and fully integrated with AI. I call these “augmenting” tools. I don’t want to isolate myself from the creative process; I want to stay involved and make every decision the AI implements. A single AI prompt window isn’t enough — every field needs its own development harness: an augmented IDE, a 3D studio, tools that perfectly integrate my decision-making with the process. Therefore, I will continue to build.
I created dozens of small tools and production-ready applications over the past few months—and saved real money by canceling subscriptions I no longer needed. All on a $20 Claude subscription, built in my spare time. This is what the market gets right about pricing: a hard time is ahead of SaaS companies.
What does it mean for my profession—software engineering? No need to worry. I think the same thing will happen as happened to mathematics when the first calculators and computers appeared. Recent innovations won’t make the profession obsolete; rather, they’ll change how we work. Humanity will still need people who can reason and judge - and efficiently use modern tools like AI.
