18 Steps to Vibe Coding Nirvana - Part 01
Its taking the World by storm - or so my algorithms would want me to think. Let's not get too excited here. Probably 0.05% of us have actually taken a vibe coded app into production yet. Have I? Nope - but I've built countless numbers of them as examples and full blown applications.
I recently spoke to a student of IT about his use of AI. He said he doesn't use it for a number of reasons (which we don't need to go into). You would be right in thinking I was surprised. However, I suspect that if I asked everybody in the class of 25, how many were developing a serious application right now using vibe-coding as their vehicle, I reckon 0% would say they in fact are doing so - an educated guess!
Bringing an App to Market
My 'intellectually honest' research leads me to believe that approximately 2 million people have brought a meaningful app to market on either the Apple App Store or the Google Playstore. That is - about 1 person for every 10,000 has created and published a meaningful app on an appstore I was privileged to be one of those people with my good mate Ashley. This is an educated guess I know but in my experience I have had dozens (actually) of people come to me and say "Hey Pete I have a great idea for an app". A number of those were really good ideas and doable and I believe that there was a market for them. How many of those people ever got started? None. I wasn't surprised at all.
Now let me tell you what kind of an effort it was to develop our app. It wasn't another bloody todo, exercise or meal planner app. It was a complex chord music editor/publisher. It took us 14 months of effort with about 5 hours sleep a night and we both had young families and stressful fulltime jobs. When we released it I thought to myself "I'm never doing that again in my life". This is why it is 1 in 10,000 and most never even reach the first hurdle. Part of the reason it “failed” was lack of marketing, business strategy and no one around me except perhaps one person I knew was prepared to support it in any way, shape whatsoever! I was a bit naive in thinking that friends would be helpful - there’s a warning for you all - virtually nobody will give a [insert word]. Its down to you!
Having said all that, it is worth pointing out that the development experience was extremely educational and transformative. We sold between 5-10k copies of the app - better than a kick in the teeth.
This was the skeuomorphism design for SongCat
So why should it be any different now? AI can code - so bloody what? Well this is what is happening now in companies across the board according to ZME Science: About a third of code was being written by AI in the US in early 2025 (https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/ai-is-writing-nearly-a-third-of-code/). A year later (now) I guess it is more. However, digging deeper, the article reckons that the group getting the most benefit is not people who can't code, nor junior developers. Rather it is Senior Devs with a tonne of experience. This is straight from the article:
"The real 'force multipliers' are the seasoned veterans. Experienced developers use AI less frequently (27% of their code) but drive the entirety of the study’s documented 3.6% increase in overall productivity. Bear in mind these figures lead up to 2024, so today AI code is most likely even more pervasive."
So this is my take. I reckon today in 2026, if and only if you are at the level of a systems architect with a bunch of coding experience and environments behind you, you can develop 100% of your code with AI and be between 1000 and 10000% more productive. Don't believe me? Well - maybe I'm wrong but I reckon that the fact that developers are NOT or may not be doing this... is perhaps the most significant missed opportunity this century so far. It certainly won't last forever.
Whilst it is early on in the year, this is my Github so far. I reckon I have done more in the first 3 months of 2026 than I have in any other year of my life as a developer (too many years to count) - possibly in the entirety of my career (and thats cumulative). That must say something. I know what it says because I'm doing this every day (almost).
So what does it look like and what should vibe-coding look like?
Well in my experience it doesn't look like this:
Write a prompt - "Write me an application for a todo list" (or whatever)
Deploy your app (or have the AI service deploy it for you if you have no idea what the word "deploy" means.
The above process is total and utter nonsense (to put it politely).
Next time, we'll have a look at my 18 steps!
