Vibe Coding Era: Three Survival Tips for Ordinary People

Written by: Haotian

A friend asked me: “You study Vibe Coding every day, what kind of awesome app have you actually made? Give me a link to see?”

I smiled and didn’t provide a link. Because the question itself is stuck in the logic of the old era and can’t get out.

Most people’s understanding of Vibe Coding still stays at the tool level of “can write an app even if you don’t understand the code.” They search on the screen for大量 AI-generated code, still worried about whether this thing can be delivered smoothly, and whether it can be commercialized and monetized.

Wrong.

Vibe Coding is not to compete with excellent product managers who have been in the workplace for twenty years, nor to make you dream of a solo company rivaling Google’s business empire every day, nor to guide you to quickly launch products and compete in the already red ocean SaaS service market.

Really, my thinking is very pure: Vibe Coding is just an AI-driven reconstruction of “personal workflow.”

If you’re still tangled up in what a “finished product” is, here are three reflections I want you to hear:

The greatest work is to use AI to reconstruct your “social attributes.”

In traditional workplace structures, what are we?

We are a “radish pit.” You are responsible for the front end, they handle budgeting, product managers fill in, and most of the time is wasted on friction costs of cross-department collaboration. When you push a project, 90% of your energy is spent on communication, waiting, and granular details.

But what is the essence of Vibe Coding? It is “building a team alone.”

When you learn to control code with natural language, you no longer need to rely on headphones that can never meet deadlines, no longer need to kneel and beg designers for graphics, and no longer waste most of your time on cross-department collaboration.

You can use Vibe Coding to pre-visualize product design diagrams, simulate and implement logic in advance, thereby troubleshooting potential issues before cross-departmental business feedback, greatly improving inter-departmental collaboration efficiency.

So, to put it abstractly, the biggest achievement of Vibe Coding is that you successfully free yourself from dependence on others.

Your workplace identity shifts from “T-shaped talent” to “super cluster,” and versatile “screws” will become the most devalued assets in the Vibe Coding era.

You are no longer a part waiting for instructions; you become a closed-loop system. This sense of “self-reliance,” this ability to immediately execute what you think of, is the “work” you should be most proud of.

Recursive evolution: awakening the “execution layer” of the AI brain

Many people use AI just to “slack off,” and secretly at that, always feeling it’s unseemly, as if they are cheating students.

But in my logic, the core of Vibe Coding is to use AI to “arm” thinking, to replace yourself in doing all the mental and tedious work, but you must always be the strategist and decision-maker because you need to guard against AI losing its way and causing other coefficient losses.

In the era of Vibe Coding, AI is like your tireless, all-knowing, all-powerful engineering team.

Old workflow: You have 10 points of inspiration, but 9 points are consumed by code errors, environment setup, documentation investigation, and other trivial matters, leaving only 1 point of成果.

New workflow: Keep that 10 points of inspiration, and hand over the remaining 90 points of execution details entirely to AI. I don’t understand Python syntax? AI writes it. I don’t understand API documentation? AI reads it. I don’t even know what architecture to use? AI provides solutions, and I choose.

This is not just an efficiency boost but a “step-up.”

To put it abstractly, you can not only let AI help with work but also let AI teach your AI commands (skills, gems, guided learning, etc.) to do the work, and after completing the work, let your AI help review, debug, and deliver the final成果.

Finally, you can strip away all the “how” to AI, and only focus on the “what” at a higher level.

In this process, AI is no longer an external tool; it internalizes as a “co-processor” of my brain. Ultimately, AI can help handle all boring, repetitive, energy-consuming “execution actions,” allowing me to transfer all valuable brain bandwidth to the most core “decision-making” and “aesthetics.”

Therefore, the ultimate goal of Vibe Coding is not what code you write, but how high-frequency your thinking and AI are in sync.

You don’t need to deliver anything to the world; you only need to satisfy “yourself.”

This is the cruelest, yet most realistic point.

99% of giant’s Vibe Coding tutorials are teaching you how to make SaaS to earn money, how to become an independent hacker super individual.

All I can say is, these are just inspiring motivational clichés. Don’t dream. In a mature industrial and commercial environment, good products require extremely complex pricing systems, distribution channels, compliance, and risk control—these are the games of geniuses, capital, and mature teams, and they belong to ordinary people.

The biggest misconception of ordinary people is that they just start and want to use AI to deliver something to others in exchange for applause or money.

I can only say, these are only for a few geniuses or anomalies. Most ordinary people can truly benefit from Vibe Coding through “internal growth.”

An automation script may never sell, and its interface might be terribly ugly, but it saves you 2 hours of garbage time every day on reports; you craft a data analysis tool, maybe the code is a mess, but it helps you see signals in the complex stock or crypto markets that others can’t.

Really, that’s enough.

For most people, Vibe Coding is not about becoming the next Peter-level figure (solo, earning millions annually), but about equipping yourself with a set of personalized, customized, and effective “secret weapons” that can improve efficiency and self-defense in your current job, business, and life.

Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that good products will naturally emerge, but that belongs to a very few geniuses.

Most people can use Vibe Coding to become stronger, no longer constrained by tech towns, and no longer hindered by inefficient processes—this alone is worth being content.

So, next time someone asks you: “What is your Vibe Coding work?”

You can confidently point to your head and say: “The work is right here.”