When Karpathy coined "vibe coding" earlier this year, a lot of people laughed. It became a meme almost overnight - the guy who doesn't read the code, accepts every suggestion, and hopes for the best. I laughed too, a bit. And then I spent the rest of the year watching it quietly change who gets to build things.

Here's what I mean. This year I helped my fiancée build her company's website. I helped my nephew build a game. I helped my mother build a photo album. And I helped an Uber driver build an app his customers can use to book him for rides directly. None of them are developers. None of them would have written a line of code a couple of years ago, and none of them needed to now. What they needed was an idea and the willingness to sit down and build it.

That's the real shift, and it's easy to miss if you're busy laughing at the meme. Coding has been democratised for everyone. The barrier used to be years of learning syntax and frameworks and why your build is broken at 2am. Now the barrier is the willingness to build something. That's a much lower wall, and a lot more people are climbing it.

For those of us who already code, the change is just as big, it just looks different. I'll say it plainly because it's true for me: work that used to need a team of three developers, I now do myself with a handful of AI subscriptions, for a fraction of the cost. It wasn't an easy shift to make. But writing code by hand against someone who's working with these tools is horses against race cars. The horse is beautiful. The race car wins.

What I didn't give up is the thinking. I still design the solution and the architecture, every time. I decide what the system is, how the pieces fit, where the data lives, what happens when something breaks. The models write most of the code, and I review it, steer it, throw it away when it's wrong. I've started calling it Architect-in-the-loop.

The other thing I've noticed is that the models have personalities, and they're good at different jobs. The way I work now, ChatGPT is my EA and PM, keeping track of things and turning my rambling into plans. Claude is my lead developer, with Opus for the deep coding, Sonnet for thinking through architecture, and Haiku for quick debugging. Perplexity is my research analyst. Gemini is my BA. And there's a small open model running on my laptop for flights, because apparently I can't stop working even at thirty thousand feet :P

The trick isn't picking the "best" model. It's designing how they hand off to each other. Which one drafts, which one checks, which one gets the final say. It's a lot like running a team, because it is running a team. You're architecting your dream team, and just like with people, chemistry is key.

And here's the part I didn't expect. This has made me fall back in love with coding.

I lost that love in college. I walked into my first semester exams able to write good code, better than what we'd been taught in places, and I almost failed, because the examiner could only give me marks if my code matched the answer key. Four years of memorising code instead of thinking about it, and by the end I didn't want to write another line. Now the distance between an idea and a working thing is an evening, and nobody's checking whether my code matches anyone's answer. It only has to work. I've been building more this year than I have in a decade, and it feels like being eighteen again, before the system got to me.

I won't pretend it's all rosy. The models are improving faster than any developer can, which is exciting and a little unsettling at the same time - that's Karpathy's lament, and I feel it too. The skill that holds its value is knowing what to build and how it should fit together. The typing was never the hard part.

So if you've got an idea you've been sitting on, this is the year the excuses ran out. Sit down and build the thing. Keep an architect in the loop, even if the architect is you.

Don't get left behind.