Friends, last week I was sitting in a coffee shop and a young developer came up to me. He said, “Pinal bhai, I built an entire application last weekend and I did not write a single line of code myself.” I looked at him. I thought he was joking. He was not joking. He showed me the app on his phone. It was working. It was clean. And he built it by simply talking to an AI. That is vibecoding. And trust me, once you understand it, you will not look at software development the same way again.
Today I am introducing this new Vibecoding icon, and anyone is free to use it in their posts, projects, and experiments.
So What Exactly Is Vibecoding?
Let me explain it simply. Vibecoding means you describe what you want to build in plain English, and an AI tool writes the code for you. You do not open Visual Studio and start typing SELECT statements (I know, heartbreaking for a SQL guy like me). Instead you open an AI coding tool and say something like “Build me a dashboard that shows monthly expenses with a nice pie chart and make it look professional.”
And the AI does it. The HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, all of it. Right there in front of your eyes.
The term became popular because of Andrej Karpathy. He is a very well known AI researcher. My friend called it “coding without coding” and honestly that is the most accurate description I have heard so far.
How Does It Work in Practice?
The process is surprisingly simple. You open a tool like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit Agent, or Claude. Then you type what you want in normal language. Not pseudocode. Not syntax. Just plain words like you are explaining to a colleague over chai.
For example you might say: “I want a student management system where I can add students, edit their marks, and see who is failing. Use a clean modern design.”
And the tool generates everything. You look at it, you ask for changes, you say “make the table sortable” or “add a search box at the top” and it updates accordingly.
It is like having a very fast junior developer sitting next to you who never gets tired, never complains about deadlines, and never takes a lunch break. (Although honestly, someone should give the AI a lunch break. It is working too hard.)
The whole experience feels like a conversation. You talk, the AI builds, you review, you talk some more. Back and forth until the application is what you wanted. Sometimes it takes five minutes. Sometimes you and the AI go back and forth twenty times and you start feeling like you are arguing with your spouse about where to go for dinner. “No, I said blue background.” “I have updated the background.” “That is green.” “I apologize.” Classic.
Why I Think This Is a Genuine Revolution
Now let me tell you why I am so excited about this. And I do not say “revolution” loosely. I have been in this industry for over two decades. I have seen many trends come and go. But this one is different.
Think about how many people in the world have brilliant ideas for software but cannot build it because they never learned programming. Teachers who want a better classroom management tool. Small shop owners who want a simple billing app. That cousin of yours who has a “million dollar app idea” that he brings up at every family function. Until now, all of them were stuck. They either had to learn coding (which takes years) or hire a developer (which takes money).
Vibecoding removes that barrier completely. You just need to know what you want. That is it. The AI handles the how.
For working developers, this is not a threat. I want to be very clear about that because I know many of you are worried. Vibecoding handles the boring repetitive stuff. The boilerplate. The scaffolding. The things that make you want to close your laptop and go sell pakoras instead. It frees you up to think about architecture, performance, security, and the actually interesting problems.
I was talking to a DBA friend recently and he told me he used vibecoding to quickly build an internal monitoring dashboard that would have taken him two weeks to code manually. He did it in one evening. One evening! He spent the rest of the week actually optimizing queries, which is what he should have been doing all along.
The Funny Reality of Vibecoding
Now I will be honest. Vibecoding is not all sunshine and rainbows. There are some genuinely funny situations happening out there.
People are deploying applications to production that they cannot debug because they never actually read the code. Imagine sitting in a client meeting and someone asks “Can you explain how the authentication module works?” and you have to smile and say “It works very well” and quickly change the topic. We have all been in meetings like that, but now there is a whole new reason for it.
The debugging process with vibecoding is also comedy gold. When something breaks, you just copy the error message and paste it back to the AI and say “please fix.” It is basically the same energy as taking your car to the mechanic and saying “it is making a sound” and hoping for the best. Sometimes the AI fixes it instantly. Sometimes it introduces three new bugs while fixing one. And sometimes you end up in a loop where the AI keeps apologizing and breaking things further and you start wondering who is debugging whom.
My favourite part is when people say “I am a full stack developer now” after vibecoding one todo app. Bhai, I have been writing SQL for twenty plus years and I still learn something new every week. But sure, you vibecoded a calculator app, you are full stack now. Congratulations. Put it on LinkedIn.
What This Means Going Forward
Jokes aside, I genuinely believe vibecoding is going to open doors that were previously closed for millions of people. The ability to turn an idea into working software using just your words is powerful beyond what most people realize right now.
Will every vibecoded app be ready for enterprise use? No. Will some of these apps fall apart the moment real users touch them? Absolutely yes. But that is okay. Every revolution starts a little messy. The important thing is that people who were never part of the software building process are now part of it. And that changes everything.
My advice is simple. Try it. Open any AI coding tool this weekend. Describe something you always wanted to build. See what happens. You might be surprised. You might be frustrated. You will definitely laugh at least once.
And if the app breaks, do what every great developer has done since the beginning of time.
Close the laptop. Make chai. Try again tomorrow.
A Funny Thought I Had With Myself
While writing this post, I had a little conversation with myself that I want to share with you all.
Me: You know what, Pinal? Someone is going to read this blog post and try to vibecode your Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check service.
Also Me: What do you mean?
Me: I mean someone will open an AI tool and type “Build me something that does what Pinal Dave does in 4 hours for SQL Server performance tuning.” And the AI will generate a nice looking dashboard with some charts and a big green button that says “Fix Everything.”
Also Me: And? Will it work?
Me: It will look impressive. It might even run a few scripts. But here is what the AI cannot vibecode: twenty plus years of experience. The ability to read a system like a doctor reads an X-ray. The instinct to know exactly which query is causing trouble within the first 15 minutes. The understanding of why something is broken, not just what is broken.
Also Me: So you are saying your job is safe?
Me: I am saying you can vibecode a todo app. You can vibecode a dashboard. But you cannot vibecode experience and intuition. At least not yet. Until the AI learns to drink chai and troubleshoot deadlocks at the same time, I think my Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check is safe.
Also Me: Fair enough. Now go make chai.
If you have tried vibecoding already, I would love to hear your experience in the comments. And if you vibecoded something that went hilariously wrong, please share that too. We could all use a good laugh.
Note: Images and minor grammar improvements were assisted by GenAI, but the story, opinions, and writing are entirely my own.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
