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If you’ve been around tech Twitter this year, you’ve probably heard someone talking about “vibe coding.” Maybe you scrolled past a viral meme, found Karim’s thread about reinventing Web3, or noticed that Collins Dictionary named this word of the year. But stripping away the hype, what does vibecoding actually enable and who actually practices it?
To find out, I spoke to Eric Chen, co-founder of Injective. His team just announced a series of new products, including iBuild, an AI-powered development platform that lets you build and deploy apps without writing a single line of code.
Chen begins conversations with a mix of unfiltered excitement and grounded pragmatism, traits that are almost a prerequisite for survival in this industry’s perpetual cyclone.
What is vibecoding and why is everyone suddenly talking about it?
Vibe Coding is, in the simplest of terms, “for just about everyone.” At least, that’s Chen’s opinion.
“If you are very new to software development, Vibe Coding is your gateway to creating and shipping your first application and a very exciting product with just very simple text commands.”
Vision is frictionless, a kind of ChatGPT for coding. Users describe their desires in everyday language, and the system (part conversational AI, part full-stack development toolkit) builds the skeleton of a working application, sometimes within minutes.
“Essentially, it gives you the starting steps to develop a very powerful website, allowing you to turn your idea into a full-fledged product within hours.”
So, will vibecoding completely replace developers? Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. In practice, this acts as something like an “optimizer”. Chen explains:
“If you’re a very experienced senior software engineer, Vibe Coding is even more powerful because it elevates you from a development lifecycle perspective and really accelerates the development process. You know, with just a few sentences of commands, you can essentially turn an idea into a complete product.”
It’s not just a story from the valley. According to a recent study, nearly 75% of developers at early-stage startups use some type of vibe coding in their workflows, and more than half claim it increases delivery speed by at least 30%. And yes, this meme is real. “A quarter of Y Combinator startups use the Vibe coding platform to get their MVP off the ground.”
Injective’s iBuild: Ship products at lightning speed
Still, buzzwords aren’t enough for Chen. He wants a receipt. Join Injective’s iBuild platform to show us how vibe coding can go beyond the hypothetical. He shares:
“The other day I was demoing this to the community before release…so I just went on Twitter and said to them, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ That way you can create and show it off within minutes. ”
What happened next, Chen says, feels like the purest form of collaborative research and development.
“I initially created an on-chain lottery app using iBuild within minutes and managed to ship it. Then it actually became a production game developed by Hyper Ninjas because they saw the idea and liked it.”
The examples continue. Chen talks about how an app he also created in minutes called Pushin’ P went viral. he said with a laugh.
“I think we really opened Pandora’s box with iBuild.”
Indeed, the whole theme surrounding AI development seems to be one of unleashing mysterious powers that no one quite understands how to decipher.
What’s the result? What was once a process fraught with arcane syntax, libraries, and implementation headaches is now possible with “no barriers to entry.”
In Injective’s recent competition, community members built different types of websites and launched fully operational apps, with about 20 websites deployed within 24 hours, Eric said.
From Sandbox to Mainnet: Why Safety Still Matters
A concern with AI-powered development tools, especially those that rely heavily on automation like iBuild, is safety. If someone can launch a smart contract or financial primitive with just a prompt and a click, what’s to stop the entire system from becoming a honeypot for the next exploit? Chen didn’t shy away from the question.
“It really depends on the complexity of the application…and it’s up to the user to judge what the risk parameters are.”
What makes Injective’s approach more secure, he explains, is its fully audited modules that detect and stop fraud and malicious code. he says:
“You can create all sorts of expressive and very interesting applications, but at the same time there are fixed toolkits and modules that protect your users.”
So even if the AI hallucinates and generates unstable code, transfers, payments, and financial rails are established at the protocol level.
“Critical components such as payments and various types of financial layers are fully audited and secure, supporting tens of billions of dollars in usage and security.”
AI: Double your friends, your enemies, and your productivity
This is a sign of the times we live in, as Vibe coding not only facilitates learning for beginners, but has also become a staple for serious developers.
“AI is like part of a developer’s daily lifestyle. AI can autocomplete much of the code that developers are trying to write. Even small deviations from logic can be fixed fairly quickly.”
But as with any powerful accelerator, moderation is key, Chen points out.
“There’s an efficient frontier, or optimal point, where you can increase productivity if you use it. But if you use it beyond that point, it actually reduces productivity and safety.”
He says most experienced programmers quickly understand exactly what the point is, and the platform itself is careful not to encourage lazy development habits. However, large language models bring not only speed but also risk.
Since I’m not yet a vibe coder myself, I asked Chen what hallucinations look like in coding compared to text. Are you making stuff up while stubbornly defending your work?
“It still follows the syntax and general structure, but sometimes the logic is implemented incorrectly, such as the library you try to import doesn’t exist. When it comes to the software development process, the interesting thing about vibe coding is that mistakes are detected almost instantly by the compiler and runtime. Errors are very redundant, and LLM can catch them and fix them right away.”
Rather than scouring lines to find missing semicolons, this experience is more focused on doing “very quick triangulation” and allowing LLM to automatically correct course.
So what are people actually building?
No matter how much we talk about productivity, it’s the results that matter. Chen describes the range from decentralized applications for agriculture, to professional tools for transaction automation, to mini-casino games, to “really cool, visual, artistic applications.”
This dynamic is intoxicating. A development culture that remixes itself with new primitives at the speed of light.
“It ranges from games to transaction-related enhancements to agent transactions and more.”
And how will iBuild monetize its platform? It’s a very “transparent” model, Chen says, another legacy of Web3’s values.
“It’s pay-as-you-go. You pay based on your API usage, so you don’t have to pay a monthly fee.”
So, with so many companies jumping into this new wave of “coding by vibe”, how does Injective stand out? He explains:
“Since Injective has a MultiVM environment, this means that we actually have an additional web assembly environment that leverages Rust. Rust is a very secure language and prevents many Vibe coding solutions from writing unsafe code.”
More importantly:
“These built-in financial modules, chain-level components like exchange modules are completely secure and there is no way for a misconfigured application to interact with it in an insecure way.”
And the ecosystem is only growing. Injective recently launched its EVM, and “dozens of exciting partners” are deploying on top of Injective every day.
“EVM opens up a virtual machine environment for the backbone smart contract, performance, exchange, and financial layers to millions of developers and potentially billions of users.”
Coding at the pace of memes
Vibe coding is more than just this year’s buzzword. It’s about remapping who can build, how quickly ideas move from whiteboard to mainnet, and what’s possible when teams like Injective put powerful tools in the hands of everyone, regardless of their coding background.
As the means of creating software move this fast and barriers to entry disappear, the pace of development will only increase. The only way to catch up? It may just be to suit the mood (dare I say it?).
