Vibe Coding: The Rise of Prompt-Based App Creation

Software was historically built like machinery; line by line, bracket by bracket, syntax by syntax. For forty years, the dominant model was “code as construction”. But the last eighteen months have broken that mental model. LLMs and agent-based coding systems are pushing software creation toward semantic articulation: you describe what the app should do, not how it should be written.

Developers call this “vibe coding” because the vibe, that is, the intended behaviour, becomes the primary material. The implementation is generated and the role of the engineer moves up the abstraction ladder. And this shift is not superficial. It restructures how value is created inside technology.

Execution Collapses, Imagination Expands

The most expensive part of software was never imagination. It was translation. Humans think in concepts. Code demands symbols. Vibe coding removes the translation effort and lets imagination become executable instantly.

Think of an app that ingests a PDF invoice, extracts entities, maps them to GST categories, and pushes them to Tally. Three years ago, that required a backend dev, a frontend dev, a workflow API engineer, and a week of iteration. Today, a developer (or even a product manager) can describe that in natural language and generate a working prototype in minutes. This is not “no-code”. It is post-code — where code still exists, but the human does not need to write it manually.

Engineering Becomes Orchestration

The most valuable engineer in this era is not the fastest typist. It is the clearest thinker. If execution is free, clarity becomes the scarce resource. The new professional skill is articulation and being able to define the use-case precisely, specify constraints, tune prompts, anchor edge cases, and describe failure states. The “craft” becomes system framing.

Ironically, senior engineers become even more important in this case because good prompts require conceptual depth. Seniority stops being years typing code and becomes years understanding tradeoffs.

Is This the Death of Software Engineering?

A lot of people think this kills programming. In reality, it does not. It kills rote typing, scaffolding and boilerplate. But the work behind the work, which includes the understanding of users, systems, constraints, and real-world stakes becomes more valuable, increasing the need for more competent software engineers. The person who can design how 20 AI-agents should collaborate is more valuable than the person who can write a React hook.

And this is the real revolution where engineers will not be replaced, the barrier between the idea and product will collapse.