Something interesting is happening in frontend and indie dev circles lately.
People aren’t talking about the best stack anymore.
They’re talking about how it felt to build something.
That’s where “vibe coding” comes in — and no, it’s not laziness or lack of skill. It’s a reaction.
So… what does “vibe coding” actually mean?
Vibe coding isn’t about ignoring best practices.
It’s about starting with momentum instead of architecture diagrams.
You open your editor with a clear intention:
“I want to solve this one problem.”
No roadmap. No premature abstractions.
Just flow, feedback, and shipping.
Most vibe-coded projects start with:
- A single itch
- A weekend
- A refusal to overthink
And surprisingly often, they work.
Why tiny tools are having a moment
Developers are tired. Not burned out — overloaded.
Overloaded with:
- Boilerplate
- Config files
- Infra decisions before the first feature
- Framework opinions you didn’t ask for
Tiny tools feel refreshing because:
- They load instantly (mentally and technically)
- You understand the whole system
- There’s no “framework tax”
- Every line of code has a purpose
A tool that does one thing well is easy to trust — and easy to maintain.
Shipping fast beats perfect architecture (most of the time)
Perfect architecture is amazing… when you actually need it.
But most ideas die long before scale becomes a real problem.
Vibe coding flips the priority:
- Does it work?
- Is it useful?
- Would someone else care?
You can refactor later.
You can rewrite later.
You can add infra later.
What you can’t recover is lost momentum.
When heavy stacks are just… heavy
Frameworks like Next, SSR setups, complex backends — they’re powerful tools.
They’re also expensive decisions.
Not in money, but in:
- Cognitive load
- Setup time
- Maintenance
- Mental friction
If your project:
- Doesn’t need SEO
- Doesn’t need auth
- Doesn’t need persistence
- Doesn’t need scale (yet)
Then pulling in heavy infra isn’t engineering — it’s hesitation disguised as professionalism.
Sometimes the best stack is:
Browser + APIs + ship.
The magic of tools that solve one problem well
The most loved tools usually share one trait:
clarity of purpose.
No dashboards.
No feature creep.
No “platform”.
Just:
- Input
- Action
- Output
When a tool does one thing:
- Users understand it instantly
- Bugs are easier to reason about
- The UX almost designs itself
This is where vibe coding shines the most.
A small example from my own experiments
One of my recent vibe-coded projects was a browser-only image tool.
No backend.
No uploads.
No accounts.
Just browser APIs doing their job.
It started as a quick experiment — and turned out to be surprisingly useful. Not because it’s complex, but because it gets out of the way and lets the browser do the work.
That’s the quiet power of vibe coding:
you build less, and users get more.
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