A Reporter Walked Into a Vibe Coding Class
So a Business Insider reporter in Singapore signed up for a weekend vibe coding class. Two mornings. No coding background. By the end of it, he'd built a personal trainer app in about an hour.
The part that got me? He said most of that hour wasn't even him doing anything. It was him waiting for the AI to generate the app while he refined his prompts. He literally went and got coffee while his app built itself.
The class was run by a group called 65labs, which is apparently Singapore's AI builder collective. And the instructors said something that I think about all the time: when building gets this cheap and fast, the bottleneck isn't technical skill anymore. It's ideas and lived experience.
One of the instructors, Sherry Jiang, put it perfectly. She said the people building the most interesting stuff aren't engineers. They're the feng shui practitioner who wants to make the practice more accessible. The food stall owner who needs a tool for daily operations. People who actually understand the problem because they live it every day.
That hits home for me. When I built PillStreak for my sister-in-law (she's in nursing school and needed a better way to study drug names), I wasn't thinking about React components or database schemas. I was thinking about her sitting at her kitchen table with flashcards, wishing there was a better way. The tech was just how the idea got out of my head and onto her phone.
The other thing the instructors drilled into the class: don't fall in love with your first app. Building is so fast now that it's smarter to start over than to keep patching something broken. Kill it and rebuild. That's not failure, that's just iteration.
I think the biggest shift happening right now is that "who can build software" is becoming a completely different question than it was two years ago. It used to be gatekept by technical knowledge. Now it's gatekept by whether you have a good idea and understand your users. That's a massive change, and honestly, it's the reason I got into this work. Helping people who have the ideas but not the technical background turn those ideas into real things.
If you've been sitting on an app idea thinking "I'd need to hire a developer for that," maybe not anymore.