Hey! Ankur here, and this is the 15th edition of Lazy AI — 5 mins of reading to help you stay ahead of the AI curve.
Today’s piece is personal. I built something with AI. Then I showed it to someone who actually knows what they’re looking at. What happened next was...humbling, to say the least.
So I want to talk about the whole “vibe coding” fad going on in the AI world.
Let’s dive in..
The promise
“Build an app in a day. No code required. Just describe what you want.”
Platforms like Emergent, Lovable, and Bolt are everywhere right now.
Emergent hit $50M in annual revenue in 7 months.
Over 5 million users have built 6 million+ apps on it.
25% of YC’s Winter 2025 startups had codebases that were 95% AI-generated.
The word for this is vibe coding.
Vibe coding is when you build software by describing what you want in plain English and AI writes the code for you. You don’t review every line — you look at the output, tweak your instructions, and keep going.
I’d been hearing this pitch for months. So I did what I usually do — I tried it myself.
The first few hours were magic
I started building an app on Emergent. Not as an experiment — as something I actually want to ship.
And honestly? It was incredible! I described what I wanted. Screens appeared. Features worked. Things that would have taken a developer two weeks, materialised on a Saturday night.
(Well, yeah, I didn’t have any plans for a Saturday night).
The output? I was genuinely pleased with myself!
Then I showed it (off) to my engineer friend.
He found 10 things wrong in 10 minutes
Ten. In ten minutes.
Things I couldn’t have spotted because I didn’t know to look for them.
Architecture decisions that would crumble under real traffic
Features that worked fine with one user but would break with a hundred
Security gaps I didn’t know existed
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And then he said something that stuck with me: “The app Emergent built for you used Google Gemini Flash 3 for everything. That’s fine for some tasks, but for parts of this, GPT-4o would do the same job at 50% of the cost.”
I didn’t even know I could choose. The platform picked the LLM for me. I didn’t question it because I didn’t know there was a question to ask.
That’s the thing. When you don’t know what you don’t know, everything looks fine. The app worked. It looked great. It just wasn’t built to survive contact with real users.
So what’s the point I’m making?
Here’s what I think most people are missing. There are actually two kinds of vibe coding.
Type 1: You don’t write or read any code. You describe what you want. AI builds it. You deploy it without checking the code. This is what’s being sold to people like you and me — non-tech founders, marketers, operators who just want to build something.
Type 2: AI writes the code, but an engineer drives. A developer describes what they need, AI generates the code, and then the developer reviews it, restructures it, stress-tests it. AI does the drafting of the code. The human does the engineering.
Type 2 is genuinely powerful.
My engineer friend uses AI to write code every day. He’s faster because of it. But he’s also better, because he knows what to check, what to change, and what to discard. He knows which model to use for which job. He knows what “scalable” actually means in practice, not just as a buzzword.
Type 1 — the version being sold as a revolution — is great for 2 things: Prototypes, and basic apps. Honestly? That is genuinely valuable. Being able to go from idea to working demo in a weekend used to cost thousands. Now it costs an evening.
But prototypes or websites are not sellable products. Not what can make you a few hundred thousand dollars.
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So here’s what I think
I’m not here to tell you which tools to use or whether to try vibe coding. You should actually try it. It’s genuinely fun.
But I want you to go in with your eyes wide open.
If you have an idea for an app — vibe code it. Build a prototype. Show it to people. See if the idea has legs. That part is real, and it’s extraordinary.
But the moment people start paying, the moment real data flows through, the moment you need it to work for a thousand users and not just ten — bring in an engineer. Not because AI failed. Because AI did exactly what it was designed to do. It gave you a brilliant first draft.
Shipping a product isn’t a first draft. It’s
architecture
systems thinking
cost optimisation, and
a hundred decisions that only someone with engineering experience knows to make.
AI moved the starting line closer. That’s genuinely amazing. But the finish line? That hasn’t moved. Not yet.
So as a non-tech person, try to vibe code to understand how your product would look, or build a personal app. But don’t let go of your engineer friends because you now have Emergent. You still need them 😉
That’s all for today! If this got you thinking, share it with someone who’s planning to vibe code. They should know the full picture.
See you next time..
Cheers,
Ankur