The prospect of creating applications without the need of developers, designers or product managers is irresistible to anyone without the team or the technical knowledge or experience to build a modern software application. That is to say most people.
We can and should encourage the use of vibe coding as another instrument in the rapid-prototyper's toolbox, since the promise of this practice is not the creation of fully realized production apps, despite advertisements to the contrary, but to allow a person or a team to validate product ideas and features at the speed of a prompt.
The Build Trap exists when a single non-specialist can deploy an app for a few dollars after a frenzied 100 hours of vibe coding the same as it does when a full complement of designers, developers and testers spend a whole quarter to achieve the same.
The Build Trap is what happens when we mistake output for outcome—when we build features or apps simply because we can, not because anyone needs them.
Any time we prioritize output over outcome, we are in danger of creating a product that nobody wants, nobody asked for and that nobody is interested in--a product that solves no problem of any great significance to anyone.
Such products are, in a word, a waste.
We have wasted time, energy and attention on a solution that appeals to our own sense of what meets the moment over what consumers indicate an urgent appetite for.
We have wasted time, energy and attention on a course of action that will at best, do nothing and in the worst, actively destroy value: whether that's customer goodwill, earned trust or brand equity.
Does the vibe-coded shotgun approach to production apps result in less waste? Absolutely. This is not insignificant but it is hardly redemptive. Any time, energy and attention spent willing inadequate solutions into relevance is time gifted to our competitors and time for the market to move away from us.
So what should we do?
The good news is that it is the same as it ever was. Use whatever tools you have available (and generative AI is a hell of a tool) to create prototypes that you can get out quickly for the purpose of doing experiments.
Rapid experimentation matters more than easy answers—because real value comes not from how fast we build, but from how fast we learn.
What should excite the non-specialist is not the time to done, the time to a "finished" app but the time between experiments, the time between iterations: call it "cycle time".
The lower our cycle-time, the faster we can conduct experiments and get useful feedback. This was always the game. That a billion-dollar product and a pack of passionate users resulted from the experimentation is a happy accident.
Somewhere along the way we became obsessed with time-to-market as the defining element of product success, that is time-to-market with a product we can claim is "finished", instead of the arrival of a product that meets or exceeds customer expectations.
Business stakeholders and non-specialists are excited by vibe coding because it seems to confirm their perpetual suspicion that all those developers and testers and designers were really just under-miners and obstructionists.
To the untrained, vibe coding doesn't reveal hidden efficiency—it confirms a long-held fantasy: that expertise was the bottleneck all along.
"Finally," they exclaim. "Now we can just build!"
And surely they can, but to believe software is the answer is to ask the wrong question. In their glee, the non-specialist forgets that software is not the solution; it is the solution expressed in code.
Brilliant software inside a poor solution serves no one; this is hard to see and usually when we do see it, it is because the claws of the Build Trap have forced us to do so.
Vibe coding indeed opens new possibilities for creating code in greater quantity and speed than ever before--this is good--but given that, we should aim to be even wiser and act with even greater intention lest we succumb to its new perils, chief among them, the Build Trap.
Top comments (0)