Vibe Coding ❌ Gamified Coding ✅

🤩 Vibe coding is great, man. I never thought I could get hooked on to a text-based product building interface so much. But here I am, spending most of my free time, looking forward to every opportunity to pull up Cursor or Lovable/v0 along with ChatGPT/Claude firing away prompts to build something. There is a unique thrill in doing this. And I’m just a hobbyist programmer, not a full-time software engineer. 😅

🤔 What really happened? Why am I so excited about coding something now? And I think it’s not just me, most people around me are vibe coding. Designers, product managers, solo founders, marketers… almost everyone.

✨ I think the main reason it has found PMF so quickly is because it feels like gamified coding. There are so many parallels I can draw between gamification and vibe coding. (I’m not talking about the superficial ‘pointsification’ of adding points and leaderboards, but something deeper.)

1. 🏄🏽‍♂️ Vibe coding puts us into a state of psychological flow like when playing games (from Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken”), where even failure feels rewarding. And you always want to go back to it and give it another shot. You start with a clear goal (i.e. to build something) but the process is delightfully ambiguous.

2. 🧗🏽‍♀️ You are always playing on the verge of your skill level. You know you understand zilch about some advanced framework, and you are one prompt away from breaking the entire app. But you still want to do it, just because you know, that somehow you can ‘fix it’ and go ahead. You can pull up ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and at least one of them will be able to help you with the correct code snippet.

3. ⚖️ Vibe coding follows the Goldilocks principle. It’s not too hard, not too easy, it sits right in the middle “the sweet spot” that gives even a low to average skilled programmer enough confidence to build with it. Hero in frontend but noob in databases? No problemo, AI agent will draw that schema & RLS for ya.

4. 🛴 Most designers I know have never enjoyed coding because how unintuitive it feels to code and build something. Vibe coding changes that. You get immediate feedback, it’s iterative. And even when your prompt fails, you learn what doesn’t work and get better at prompt engineering.

5. 🍃 Vibe coding shifts the focus from intricate syntax and heavily technical rules of coding to the desired outcome. This is less intimidating and adds a fun experience with a feeling of collaborating in natural language with someone (even if at the other end is an AI agent).

Personally, with vibe coding I have rediscovered the joy of solo building 🏗️🚀.

And the best part? I don’t have to rely on my always-too-busy software engineer wife anymore 😉.