Learning fast and building faster with vibecoding

I didn’t set out to become a “techbro.” Honestly, I thought vibecoding was a joke the first time I heard the term. But a last week, I logged on my iMac & spun up a tiny app, and realized something weird — I was vibecoding.

If you haven’t heard of it, vibecoding is basically coding without the weight of expectations. It’s building things quickly, scrappily, often without worrying about scalability or whether investors would care. It’s hacking for the vibe, for the thrill of creating something out of nothing.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The rise of low-code tools and powerful APIs has lowered the barrier to entry so much that a single person can now build what used to take a small team. There’s also a cultural shift at play. After a decade dominated by the pressure to build billion-dollar unicorns, many developers are finding renewed joy in creating sustainable, small-scale projects. It's a quiet rebellion against the venture-backed treadmill, prioritizing creative freedom and direct community feedback over hockey-stick growth charts. The vibe is less about world domination and more about carving out your own useful corner of the internet.

There’s a different kind of energy when you’re just building because you want to, not because you’re on some deadline or roadmap. You start thinking in loops of iteration: “What’s the smallest version I can ship today? What can I tack on tomorrow?”

The thing about vibecoding is the pace. You don’t get time to overthink. You try, you ship, you break, you fix.

This new rhythm forces you to learn fast:

- How to use APIs you’ve never touched before

- How to patch things together with no clear instructions

- How to talk about your product in a way that makes people want to test it

And because everything moves so quickly, you realize tools matter. You start looking for platforms that cut the busywork.

I set up my small project with platform for online businesses, Whop, using Whop's API keys, partly because I could add it to my community and monetize it. A storefront without me needing to duct tape Stripe + Gumroad + Discord. One dashboard, one setup, and it was live. That shaved weeks off my learning curve.

By removing the operational headache, I could immediately focus on what actually mattered: getting the app into people's hands. Within the first day of launching, I already had a handful of users from my existing community giving me feedback. This is the real magic of the modern toolset. The feedback loop, which used to be a drawn-out process of beta lists and surveys, is now almost instantaneous. You’re not just coding in a void; you’re co-creating with your first users in near real-time, validating your idea with every interaction and bug report.

I’m not pretending my tiny app is going to disrupt an industry. But vibecoding taught me how quickly ideas can become products, and how much you evolve when you throw yourself into that fast-paced cycle.

It’s not about being the next Mark Zuckerberg. It’s about catching the vibe, building, shipping, and realizing you’re capable of more than you thought.

Vibecoding made me feel like a techbro, but not in the cliché sense. More like someone who’s part of this new wave of builders who don’t wait for permission. We use the tools at our disposal — Whop, Replit, Vercel, whatever makes sense — and we keep moving.

And that might be the biggest lesson: in a world where speed and experimentation win, you don’t need to build something sensational to feel like you belong. Sometimes, shipping that small app is enough to make you realize you’re already part of the game.