The Vibe Coding Casino: Why You’re Just Buying Chips, Not Building a Business
- Aki Kakko
- 5 minutes ago
- 4 min read
In the dusty trails of 1849 California, the surest way to go bankrupt was to dig for gold. The surest way to get rich was to sell picks, shovels, and denim jeans to the desperate men digging. Fast forward to 2025, and the pickaxe has been replaced by the LLM powered vibe-coding tools. The gold is the dream of the "One-Person Unicorn." And the miners are average people, swept up in the latest Silicon Valley hype cycle known as "Vibe Coding." "Vibe coding" is the colloquial term for using natural language to instruct AI (like Replit, Bolt, etc.) to write software. The promise is intoxicating: You don't need to know Python, React, or AWS. You just need an idea and a "vibe." But as your social media feeds fill with influencers claiming they built a SaaS empire in a weekend without writing a line of code, a harsh reality is far from it. We are witnessing the industrialization of a new Get Rich Quick scheme, where the startups providing the tools are extracting value from a generation of dreamers who may never see a return on their subscriptions. Here is why vibe coding for the average person is less about democratization and more about selling shovels.
The Illusion of Competence (The 80/20 Trap)
The marketing pitch for AI coding tools is simple: "If you can speak, you can code."And for the first 30 minutes, this is usually true. You can ask an AI to "build a To-Do list app that looks like cyberpunk retro," and it will generate something dazzling. The barrier to entry has dropped to zero. However, software engineering is not just about generating code; it is about maintaining it. Vibe coding tools are excellent at getting you to 80% completion. But the final 20% - handling edge cases, security vulnerabilities, database migrations, and payment integration failures - requires actual engineering knowledge. When an average person "vibe codes" an app, they are creating a "black box." They don't know how the engine works. When the app inevitably breaks (and software always breaks), the "vibe coder" is helpless. They are the captain of a ship they do not know how to repair.
The tool-makers sell the launch; they don't mention the shipwreck.
The "Dropshipping" of Software
Remember the dropshipping craze of 2016-2020? People were sold the idea that they could get rich setting up a Shopify store and letting Chinese manufacturers handle the logistics. The result was a flood of low-quality, identical storefronts. The only people who consistently made money were Shopify (the platform) and the gurus selling courses. Vibe coding is the dropshipping of the 2020s. Because the barrier to entry is non-existent, the market will be flooded with millions of mediocre, hallucinatory, and derivative apps. If you can build a clone of Airbnb in a weekend using AI, so can 50,000 other people.
The "average person" is entering a market where they have no competitive moat. The tool providers know this, but their business model depends on subscription volume, not the success of the apps built on their platforms.
The Business Model: Subscription Extraction
Look at the unit economics of the AI coding startups. They are not venture capitalists taking a percentage of your future success; they are SaaS companies charging for access.
The User: Pays 20–250/month for Pro access to faster models and more "compute."
The Hope: That they will build the next Flappy Bird or Uber.
The Reality: They build a toy app that gets 12 users, but they keep the subscription for 6 months trying to "fix" it.
To the tool-maker, a delusional user is just as profitable as a successful one. In fact, a struggling user who keeps iterating and burning through compute credits is a great customer.
These startups are incentivized to market the possibility of wealth, regardless of the probability.
Technical Debt as a Service
Vibe coding encourages "spaghetti code"—messy, inefficient, and unorganized structures that work temporarily but collapse under weight. Engineers spend years learning design patterns to avoid "technical debt" (the future cost of reworking code). AI, when prompted by a novice, prioritizes immediate functionality over long-term stability. When the "vibe coder" tries to scale their app, they will hit a wall. The cost to fix the mess the AI created will often exceed the revenue the app generates.
The startup selling the tool doesn't care; they sold you the bricks, but they aren't responsible when the house falls down because you didn't build a foundation.
The "Idea Guy" Fallacy
The most seductive lie of the vibe coding movement is that execution was the only thing holding people back. "I have a billion-dollar idea, I just can't code." Vibe coding removes the coding hurdle, exposing the brutal truth:
Code was never the hardest part of building a business.
Marketing, sales, customer support, legal compliance, and product-market fit are the hard parts. By telling average people that "coding is dead," these startups are selling a fantasy that building a product is synonymous with building a business. It isn't. You can vibe-code an application, but can you vibe-code a customer acquisition strategy?
The Verdict
None of this is to say that AI coding tools aren't revolutionary. They are. For actual developers, they are superpowers that increase productivity by 10x. For hobbyists who just want to build a tool for their personal use, they are miraculous. But for the "average person" looking for a financial exit?
Vibe coding is a casino. The startups raising millions of dollars from VCs to build these tools are the house.
The influencers selling "How to build an app in 10 minutes" courses are the card dealers. And you? If you are paying your monthly subscription hoping to stumble upon a digital goldmine without understanding the geology of the land, you aren't a pioneer. You're just a customer buying a very expensive shovel.
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