Vibe Coding Changed Everything: A 2025 Retrospective
It's the first day of 2026, and I can't stop thinking about how wild the past year has been.
Everyone was talking about "vibe coding" in 2025. Looking back at how rapidly this movement evolved, it's honestly mind-blowing. We rarely see technology shift this fast in history. And here's the thing — it's not some distant rocket science happening in a lab somewhere. It's happening right here, in our daily work, on our machines.
I'm a software engineer. I like to call myself a Maker. And this year, I've been watching — watching myself, watching my fellow engineers. The verdict is in: almost nobody is fighting this wave anymore.
Even that friend who was loudly proclaiming "I'll never use AI coding tools" just six months ago? Yeah, I caught him quietly using one the other day. The transformation has been magical.
The Old Ways of Blogging
This shift isn't just about work. It's changing our habits in ways we might not even notice yet.
Take blogging, for example. In the old days, when you wanted to start a blog, you had a few options:
Option A: Sign up for a blog service like Medium. Easy to use, decent SEO, clean templates that look good without stealing the spotlight from your writing. Simple. Effective. Not particularly unique.
Option B: Self-host a content management system like Ghost or WordPress. This is what many companies do. More control, more complexity, more maintenance headaches.
Both approaches worked. But vibe coding is quietly changing the equation.
Reinventing the Wheel (And Why That's Okay Now)
Here's what's fascinating: the change is gradual. It didn't happen overnight. Many people haven't even realized it yet.
AI coding has dramatically lowered the barrier to development, especially for well-established service patterns. And blogging? That's about as established as it gets.
With vibe coding, you can spin up your own blog system in remarkably little time. You don't need a fancy UI for collaboration. Just write your posts in Markdown, publish through your own system, and you're done.
The beauty of this approach:
- Great SEO (because you control everything)
- Your content lives alongside your code
- Completely self-contained — no database dependencies
- No registration, no login systems, no account management
- Write an article, commit the code, deploy to production
- Everything just works
This is exactly how this blog works right now.
"But Steven," you might say, "aren't you just reinventing the wheel?"
And to that I say: in the age of vibe coding, why not?
When everything becomes easier, reinventing the wheel stops being a waste of time. It becomes an opportunity. You get to build exactly what you need, shaped precisely to your requirements.
Beyond Blogging
This isn't just happening with blogs. It's spreading to all sorts of SaaS services we used to take for granted.
A while back, I built a task management service for our team. Instead of paying for someone else's solution, our thinking shifted to: "Why not just build it ourselves? It's not that hard anymore."
Sure, we reinvented a wheel. But it's our wheel now, crafted exactly to our needs. That's a beautiful thing.
I suspect 2026 will bring many more examples like this.
Writing Never Changes (But the Process Does)
The act of writing itself hasn't changed. When I was younger, I wrote tons of blog posts scattered across different platforms. Then I stopped for a long time, unsure what to write about.
But I've always loved putting thoughts into words. Whether anyone reads them isn't the point. The point is the process — writing forces me to think things through, to reconsider, to refine. I love that feeling.
What's different now is the workflow.
I built this blog with Claude Code. I write directly in Claude Code. AI helps me research, refine my content, and polish my prose. The entire process happens without leaving a single environment:
Idea → Research → Writing → Refinement → Generation → Commit → Deploy
All in one place. No fancy platform required. Just give me Claude Code and I'm good.
This is what's different about the AI era. Everyone can develop their own approach, one that truly represents who they are. AI dramatically amplifies each individual's ability to reach the world.
Starting Fresh
I'm starting 2026 with this new approach to writing.
We're lucky to be living through this moment when AI is reshaping everything. Maybe documenting these changes through writing isn't such a bad idea.
Let's see where this goes.