"Has anyone actually made money with vibe coding?" The question, posted by a senior software engineer at a major Chinese tech company, cuts through months of hype around the practice Andrej Karpathy named in early 2025 - using AI tools to build apps by describing what you want rather than writing traditional code.
The developer's experience mirrors what a lot of practitioners are finding: vibe coding with tools like Claude Code feels fast. Prototypes come together in hours instead of days. Small tools and apps materialize from natural language descriptions. But the gap between "I built a thing" and "I built a business" remains wide.
The Prototype Trap
Vibe coding excels at getting from zero to demo. Need a Chrome extension, a simple SaaS dashboard, or a data processing script? AI coding tools can produce working code in a fraction of the time. The problem starts when you try to go from demo to product. Edge cases, authentication, payment integration, error handling, accessibility, deployment infrastructure - the boring stuff that makes software actually usable - still requires real engineering judgment.
That doesn't mean nobody is making money. Indie developers on platforms like Product Hunt regularly ship AI-assisted tools that generate revenue. But most of those developers had existing software skills before they started vibe coding. The AI made them faster, not capable for the first time.
Speed vs. Sustainability
The honest answer to "can you make money vibe coding" is probably: yes, if you could have built the thing without AI anyway. The speed boost is real - what took a weekend now takes an evening. For freelancers billing by the project rather than the hour, that's a direct income multiplier. For people trying to build their first app with no coding background, the results are less clear.
The tools are improving fast. Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot are all meaningfully better than they were six months ago. But the bottleneck for turning software into revenue was never typing speed - it was knowing what to build, for whom, and how to get it in front of them. AI hasn't changed that equation yet.