Since the beginning of this year, vibe coding has gradually become one of the hot topics of discussion in the AI circle. In the cryptocurrency circle, as Bitcoin remains strong, everyones desire for the copycat season is getting stronger and stronger. The AI track in the cryptocurrency circle has gone through two hot markets, AI meme and AI Agent, from speculating on memes to speculating on frameworks, and the exploration of new AI narratives has never stopped.
“Vibe coding”, could this concept be a breakthrough narrative for the AI track in the cryptocurrency world?
What is vibe coding?
This concept was proposed by former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in a tweet on February 3 this year:
Andrej Karpathy describes vibe coding like this:
I call this new way of programming vibe coding: being completely immersed in the atmosphere, letting go, and even forgetting that you are writing code. This is possible because todays large language models (such as Cursor Composer with Sonnet) are so powerful that it is beyond imagination. I almost no longer type on the keyboard, but use SuperWhisper to talk to Composer directly. I will make some extremely casual, lazy requests, such as reduce the padding of the sidebar by half, because I am too lazy to locate where to change it myself. I am used to directly accepting all the changes generated by the AI, and I am too lazy to even read the diff. When I encounter an error message, I just copy and paste it to the AI without writing any comments, and in most cases it can be fixed. The amount of code is getting bigger and bigger, which is beyond the scope of my normal quick understanding. It takes a lot of time to fully understand it. Sometimes AI cant solve the bug, so I just bypass it, or change something randomly repeatedly until the problem disappears. For the kind of projects that you just play with on the weekend, this approach is completely fine and even quite fun. It can be said that I am indeed working on a project or web application, but this is no longer like programming in the traditional sense: I just see the problem, state the requirements, run the results, copy and paste, and the whole process can make most of the functions run.
In short, vibe coding is a development method that minimizes the programming skills required to make applications. The programming language you use is the language you use in daily communication. Tell AI what you need, and it will tinker with a usable application for you.
Existing vibe coding projects in the cryptocurrency world
dev.fun
The platform was officially launched in January this year and received investment from Colosseum in March.
You only need to describe your needs verbally on the platform, and the platform will automatically start writing code and present a usable App. For example, I asked the platform to help me make a jumping game, and the initial results are as follows:
I paid 0.01 SOL and asked the platform to modify this initial version. I put forward three requirements, namely adding background, adding sound effects and canceling the charged jump mechanism. These requirements were met.
After repeatedly modifying and polishing the App to your satisfaction, you can choose to issue a coin on pump.fun for the App itself, or link it to a certain pump.fun currency.
This mechanism means that applications produced by dev.fun can capture value as individuals, or create content or functions around a token, and even form a coding guild. For example, $buidl, the token with the highest market value on the platform, is a DAO + project incubator. The more successful projects that have appeared on dev.fun so far, such as $ZALA and $dab, were incubated by buidlDAO.
$buidls current market value is only less than 3 million US dollars. The reason why it can become the top token on dev.fun is not only because of its successful incubation in the past, but also because the dev.fun team has a close interaction with the project, and team members have mentioned it many times in their daily tweets. Given the incubators positioning, it is considered by the market to be a semi-official coin. (Note: buidl is not the official token of dev.fun, and dev.fun currently has no official token)
buildDAO is one of only 5 followers on dev.fun official Twitter
The buildDAO logo also appears on the cover of the Messari report
Another great thing about $buidl is that they created a Twitter bot @buidldev. You only need to @ the bot on Twitter and describe your application requirements, and the bot will automatically create an application on dev.fun. Its not that other companies dont have it. Ohara mentioned below also has it, but this function is officially created. So this gives everyone room for imagination...
Back to dev.fun itself, people from Colosseum have always been very supportive of dev.fun. For example, @crabbylions launched the $RICK hackathon on dev.fun:
Until recently, there have been many tweets related to dev.fun:
Currently, there are more than 21,800 applications on dev.fun. Last month, dev.fun updated its support for building Solana on-chain applications dApp:
poof.new
poof.new has received support from AllianceDAO. Compared with dev.fun, it has no tokens tied to the project and is only focused on building dApps on Solana.
Solana tipping platform example on poof.new
Remix
Remix has received support from Base, Lemniscap and Variant Fund. It is a vibe coding platform focused on games. Users can either describe their requirements to the platform from scratch to create games directly, or mix their own games with games from other developers to create a more novel version.
To date, Remix has over 500,000 players, more than 800 games, and over 18 million play times.
In terms of app discovery, Remix also excels, and its homepage is like a game market.
It is also worth mentioning that Remix has a points system related to airdrops. Behaviors such as making games, playing games, and evaluating games will earn Remix points.
Ohara
This platform is similar to dev.fun in general, and the apps made have coins, but it is not linked to pump.fun like dev.fun, but has its own launchpad built in. In addition, this platform is on Base.
The token with the highest market value on the platform is a meme coin called $HELLOWORLD. Clicking on this app is a button that jumps to the homepage of Ohara. This is also the first token of the platform, with a current market value of about $2.6 million.
Alchemist AI
This platform has issued the token $ALCH. Compared with the above projects, I think its biggest difference lies in the overall economic mechanism design. $ALCH is required to create an App on Alchemist AI. It also has a built-in application trading market, where $ALCH can be used for buying and selling.
I personally think that this idea is relatively traditional and not suitable for Crypto, which will be discussed further below.
The compatibility between vibe coding platform and the cryptocurrency world
Through the above projects, we can find that all the apps produced by these vibe coding platforms are actually lightweight applications. The advantage is that if I have a flash of inspiration and not too complicated ideas today, I can immediately implement and deliver them to the market. I don’t need to worry about how to implement them. I just need to put all my time and energy into the ideas.
In fact, vibe coding in the developer community is more used to achieve MPV (minimum version of viable product) or programming assistance (refining or modifying the code results produced by AI to improve development efficiency). When it comes to complex ideas and rigid requirements in terms of performance, security, etc., the current level of technology still cannot let AI help with a single sentence.
For developers, vibe coding may only improve work efficiency at present, but in the cryptocurrency world, it is another liberation at the level of content production. Yes, if vibe coding is not seen as a production program, but as a kind of content creation, it will have great potential in the cryptocurrency world.
The meme coin track is actually evolving continuously, and almost every bull market has an improvement in the productivity of meme coins themselves. For example, in the last meme coin bull market, pump.fun allowed everyone to issue their own meme coins at almost zero cost. Now everyone has long been accustomed to this, but in 2023 I wrote an article Actual Test | How much does it cost to issue a meme on Base? At that time, there was still a threshold for making meme coins.
The capabilities of the vibe coding platform can greatly lower the threshold for content creation. Whether you want to make a meme website or make a data dashboard around a certain token, it becomes very easy. Therefore, the potential of the vibe coding platform does not lie in being able to make an app with awesome practical utility, which is absolutely impossible for professional developers or even development teams, but in being able to create content with more diverse experiences. For example, there are live broadcasts on pump.fun, and these platforms are used to make a website that detects how many times fuck is said in the live broadcast, and automatically destroys some tokens every time it is recorded, and other such content that attracts attention.
On dev.fun, they also support rewarding users for developing features for apps on specific topics, which may become one of the ways to cold-start the next project.
In short, meme coins have developed to the point where they are not “empty value” but “hot value”. The first person who invented the familiar meme “666” did not make any money, but meme coins can solve this problem. Vibe coding has the ability to serve as an “amplifier” for popular content, and bundling it with coins also allows content creation to be better priced and monetized.
Will vibe coding become as popular as AI Agent?
On the narrative level, I personally think that vibe coding is not as grand as AI Agent. After all, AI Agent is a breakthrough narrative that allows AI to handle affairs autonomously like humans, while vibe coding is the improvement of content creation capabilities, which sounds shocking at first glance.
The power of narrative can also be evaluated from the financing situation. According to PEVC data from LaiMi, the global AI Agent track has raised more than 66.5 billion yuan in financing since 2024. Web2 AI Agent companies such as Adept AI and Inflection AI have all received large amounts of financing of over 100 million or even over 1 billion US dollars. In comparison, vibe coding will be weaker, but it still has potential. Loveable raised $15 million in its seed round in February 2024, but the Financial Times reported that there were rumors that Loveables new round of financing would exceed $150 million. Replits cumulative financing is about $270 million, and bolt.new also announced earlier this year that it had received $105.5 million in Series B financing.
Judging from the Google search situation, vibe coding (orange curve in the figure below) achieved a breakthrough in early March this year, almost reaching the search level of the keyword AI Agent during the AI Agent bull market in the cryptocurrency circle last year (November 2024 to January 2025) (blue curve in the figure below).
From the perspective of actual user perception, it may be difficult for the vibe coding concept to combine narratives to give users a refreshing sense of surprise and breakthrough, like the previous AI meme or aixbt in the AI Agent era. If the vibe coding concept can become popular, the more likely route is the platform value discovery brought about by price increases, just like the various launchpads that were popular in the AI Agent era.
Compared with AI Agent, vibe coding is new, and its narrative has just become popular in the Web2 circle. The concept of AI Agent has accumulated momentum for a long time from its emergence to its popularity and then to the big market in the currency circle. It is also easy to understand that people who dont know programming can also make money by programming. At the same time, it has not yet entered the narrative fatigue period that requires on-site exploration, because existing products can indeed produce things, but they can only evolve to produce more complex and large applications over time.
If Bitcoin remains strong and this year’s altcoin season arrives as planned, the vibe coding concept is expected to make a breakthrough.
