AI vibe-coding will not make you any money and here is why it also ought not.
Claude Code works like magic. With it at our hands, the possibilities are vast and the limitations sparse — yet very few quality products have come out of vibe-coding to break the bank. Why?
I will circle back to this question at a later point, because first I want to address the phenomenon of the hustle-bros who are vibe-coding the next Bumble, fitness tracker, or to-do app. These hustle-bros are dead set on earning money, so what do they do? They churn out generic, unoriginal apps one after another — it makes them feel productive, and some of them really do earn a dime on it — but nothing substantial. The reason they are stuck in this loop of mass-producing apps almost nobody uses is that their profession is all about being able to bring code to paper and not even a tiny little bit about making usable software for niche uses in specialized fields.
Even if they wanted to create software that is productive and usable for these niches — they can’t, and they won’t. The reasons are simple: they can’t because they lack the specialized knowledge of these fields, and they won’t because tending to such small niches won’t translate to money they can live off of.
So who would be able to create such software — software that actually increases productivity in specialized fields? The people in those fields, of course. They know what is needed, they have an idea of how it should work, and now they possess the tool that does the coding for them: Claude Code. I strongly believe that we are on the verge of a radical democratization of free or cheap software, built by professionals across all niches without compensatory interests. For them, it will be enough that their day-to-day work life has improved — and they would be glad to share it with others. I am a dentist who builds apps for my use cases; the MD would do theirs, the farmer theirs, and so on. Long enough have people in specialized professions been used as piggy banks by software companies charging far too much money on a quarterly or monthly basis for work that was done only once. The correct analogy to what this industry has been doing to normal folk would be me requiring kids whose masticatory function I corrected to pay a monthly fee for the simple fact that they are using something daily which was made possible by my work.
Insanity, right?
I have no bad blood with computer engineers — heck, my brother is one — but I must note that the way the medical industry is treated by them is horrid. I would bet that the same applies to every other niche field.
Breaking free of these shackles to developer companies comes at the cost of having to spend the effort to create something that weans us off of them. This should not be a solitary endeavor. We should, as a people, create a headspace where sharing code openly for any project is an unbreakable principle — and where the user feels it to be their moral failing when they do not put equal effort into improving an app to balance the use they got from it. On top of it all, any codebase would be editable through Claude Code to further customize it to the individual user’s needs.
So now let’s turn to the question from the beginning — why are there no quality products being vibe-coded that break the bank? I must admit that I misled you with the way I phrased the question. Quality apps are being put out by regular people for regular use — at least that is what I have done across several apps. The thing is, these apps are so special in use case and so individually tailored that the market for selling them is very slim. And nor do we need to sell such apps — me and you included. It is our duty to the society we live in and the profession we embody to be generous enough to give such gifts to our colleagues.
I personally have made a cephalometric analysis app, a slides-to-PDF app, and am working on a patient management system. All of which will be released to the public, codebase and all. I will just have to finish making my own website…
So what is the point of this article? All I wanted to say is this: it is time that software becomes essentially free — and I mean all software apart from services that cost money to maintain, like cloud storage and the like. It is up to me and you, as ants of the colony, to use the subsidized AI companies’ tokens to their maximum — to create, to share, and to improve upon one another’s projects. Why start from scratch when we can take and build from each other?