Vibe Coding Has Changed the Business I Can Build

I think vibe coding has permanently changed the kind of business I am able to build.

Not because it means I can create more things for the sake of it. There is already enough software in the world that nobody needs. What has changed is the distance between seeing a commercial problem, deciding what a business genuinely needs, and turning that decision into something useful.

In the last 90 days, I have built and launched six website projects, two mobile apps, four web apps, a commercial operating system, three interactive courses, and dozens of dynamic tools and assets.

That list is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that I did not have to start by searching for a platform that did 60% of the job, then spend months working around its limitations.

Vibe coding is changing what business owners can build

There is a slightly shallow version of the vibe coding conversation which is all about prompting an AI to produce an app quickly. It makes for a good demo, but it misses the commercial opportunity.

The real shift is that a founder or operator with enough clarity can now move much closer to the finished product. You can start with the strategy, the customer journey, the operational bottleneck, or the revenue opportunity. Then you can build the software around it.

That matters because most businesses have been trained to fit themselves around rented tools.

You choose a CRM, project management platform, booking system, learning platform, reporting tool, automation tool and a handful of spreadsheets. Each one does something useful. Together, they often create a patchwork that nobody really owns and few people enjoy using.

Every compromise seems reasonable in isolation. By the time you have made ten of them, you have a business that operates according to the constraints of its software.

I do not think that is inevitable anymore.

What I have been building differently

The work has started with strategy for clients, rather than technology for technology's sake. What is the actual requirement? What needs to happen for a customer, a team member, or an operator? Where does work get stuck? What information is missing? What should be automated, and what still needs human judgement?

Once that is clear, the build can follow.

That has meant websites with visuals and functionality designed together, rather than a nice design bolted onto a restrictive template. It has meant web and mobile apps shaped around a real workflow. It has meant interactive courses that can behave like a product, rather than simply housing a collection of videos.

It has also meant being deliberate about the foundations. The systems I am building are designed to be found, structured in a way that gives AI search a clearer chance of understanding and citing the content, and approached with security first rather than treating security as an afterthought.

None of this means every business should build every piece of software from scratch. That would be a different kind of bad decision.

Buy the boring stuff. Build what makes you different.

This is the principle I keep coming back to: buy the boring stuff, build what makes you different.

Your accounting package probably does not need to be a bespoke competitive advantage. The same is true for payroll, standard email, calendar software and plenty of other well-understood functions. Buy them. Let somebody else carry that maintenance burden.

But if a process affects how quickly you can serve customers, how well you qualify opportunities, how consistently you deliver, how intelligently you price, or how clearly you make decisions, it may be worth owning.

Those are not just internal tools. They are often part of the business model.

Historically, building them involved a difficult trade-off. You needed a big enough opportunity to justify an agency, a development team, a long specification process and ongoing technical management. Most small and mid-sized businesses could not justify it, so they rented the closest available alternative.

Vibe coding does not remove the need for judgement, architecture, testing or maintenance. It does make the economics and speed of building far more realistic.

The advantage is not faster code

I have spent the last ten years learning about how businesses scale and the systems that actually drive growth. That experience is now more valuable to me because I can apply it more directly.

The advantage is not that I can generate code faster. The advantage is that I can spot the difference between a feature that sounds impressive and a system that solves a meaningful business problem.

Code without commercial judgement is still just code. A fast build around the wrong process is still the wrong build.

That is why I do not see this as a replacement for strategy. I see it as strategy becoming more useful. Instead of producing a document, a recommendation or a backlog for somebody else to interpret, it is increasingly possible to turn the best ideas into working assets.

For me, that has accelerated nearly every area of the business. It has also made me more focused. When you can build a tailored solution, you become much less tolerant of unnecessary complexity and much more careful about what is actually worth building.

Ownership comes with responsibility

There is an important caveat here. Stopping the rental of core systems does not mean building something once and forgetting about it.

If you own a system, you own the decisions around it. That includes security, data, access, backups, improvements, documentation and who can maintain it as the business changes. A custom system that nobody understands is not an asset. It is a risk.

That is why the goal is not bespoke software everywhere. The goal is to own the parts of your operating model that create a genuine advantage, while keeping the rest as simple as possible.

It is also why I think the phrase “build versus buy” is too simplistic. The better question is: what would be costly for this business to keep compromising on?

If the answer is a process central to customer experience, revenue, delivery or decision-making, it may be time to stop forcing it into somebody else's product.

What this means for growth-focused businesses

If you are operating a patchwork of tools that do not quite serve the business, you have more options than you did even a year ago.

You can identify the work that makes you different. You can map the process before buying another subscription. You can decide which pieces should remain standard, and which deserve to become an asset the business owns.

That is the thinking behind the work I am doing through Convertico and the wider thinking I share on this blog. Technology should support the way a good business wants to operate. It should not quietly dictate it.

Vibe coding has not made business building effortless. It has made a different standard possible. The question is whether the systems your business relies on are helping you build an advantage, or simply helping you tolerate the compromises.