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If you’ve been anywhere near tech Twitter this year, you’ve probably heard someone talk about “vibe coding.” You may have scrolled past the viral memes, noticed Karim’s thread on reforming web3, or even noticed that Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year. But take away the hype: what actually makes vibe coding possible? And who are the people who really put it to work?
To find out, I spoke with Eric Chen, co-founder of Injective, whose team just released a barrage of new products, including iBuild, an AI-powered development platform that lets you build and deploy apps without writing a line of code.
Chen begins our conversation with a mix of unfiltered excitement and grounded pragmatism, qualities that might as well be a prerequisite for survival in the ongoing cyclone of this industry.
What is vibe coding and why is everyone suddenly talking about it?
Vibe coding is, in the simplest terms, “for almost everyone.” At least, that’s Chen’s opinion.
“If you are a true beginner, when it comes to software development, vibe coding is your gateway to creating your very first application and shipping… very exciting products with just very simple text commands.”
The vision is so frictionless: a kind of ChatGPT for coding. The user describes what they want using everyday language, and the system (part conversational AI, part full-stack dev toolkit) builds the foundation of a working application, sometimes in minutes.
“You can essentially have the starting steps to developing a very powerful website and turn your ideas into a complete product in just a few hours.”
So does vibe coding completely replace developers? Not exactly. Not yet anyway. It actually works as a kind of ‘optimizer’. Chen explains:
“If you’re a very experienced and experienced software engineer, vibe coding is even more powerful because it takes you to the next level in terms of the development lifecycle and really speeds up your development process. You know, with just a few commands you can actually turn your ideas into a complete product.”
That’s not just talk from the valley. According to recent studies, almost 75% of developers at early-stage startups now use some form of vibe coding in their workflow, with more than half claiming it increases their delivery speed by at least 30%. And yes, the meme is real: even “a quarter of Y Combinator startups now get their MVPs off the ground using vibe coding platforms.”
Injective’s iBuild: Ship product at lightning speed
Yet buzzwords are not enough for Chen; he wants receipts. Enter Injective’s iBuild platform, a showcase for how vibe coding goes beyond the hypothetical. He shares:
“I was demoing this with the community recently, before the launch… So I just went on Twitter and said to them, ‘Hey, do you have any ideas?’ Then I can make it and show it within minutes.”
What Chen says next feels like the purest form of collaborative R&D:
“I initially created an on-chain lottery app using iBuild in a few minutes, then managed to ship it, and it later became a production game developed by Hyper Ninjas because they saw the idea and loved it.”
The examples keep coming. Chen talks about an app called Pushin’ P that he also created in minutes that went viral. He laughs:
“I think we really opened a Pandora’s box with iBuild.”
In fact, and that seems to be an ongoing theme around all things AI development: unleashing mysterious powers that no one fully understands how to decode.
The result? What was once a process plagued by arcane syntax, libraries, and implementation issues now happens “without barriers to entry.”
In a recent competition Injective hosted, Eric says, about 20 websites were deployed in 24 hours, with community members building different types of websites and launching full production apps.
From sandbox to mainnet: why security still matters
The concern that often haunts AI-powered development tools, especially those with as much automation as iBuild, is security. If someone can set up smart contracts or financial primitives with a prompt and a click, what’s to stop the entire system from becoming the next honeypot for exploits? Chen does not avoid the question.
“It really depends on the complexity of the application… and the user has to decide what the risk parameter is.”
What makes Injective’s approach more secure, he explains, are its fully audited modules that detect fraudulent activity or bad code and stop it. He says:
“You can create all kinds of very expressive, very interesting applications, but at the same time there are fixed toolkits and modules that protect the user.”
So even if the AI hallucinates and produces shaky code, transfers, payments and financial rails are recorded at the protocol level.
“The critical components, such as payments, and different types of financial layers are absolutely controlled and secure, supporting tens of billions of dollars in usage volume and also security.”
AI: friend, enemy and productivity multiplier
Vibe coding not only speeds up beginners, but has become an important factor for serious developers, a sign of the times we live in:
“AI is part of developers’ daily lifestyles. It allows them to autocomplete a lot of the code they want to write. If it’s slightly off your logic, you can fix it pretty quickly.”
But as with all powerful accelerators, moderation is key, Chen emphasizes:
“There’s an efficient cutoff point or optimal point where you use it enough to increase productivity. But if you use it beyond that point, it actually compromises your productivity and safety.”
Most experienced programmers quickly figure out exactly what that point is, he says, and the platform itself ensures that lazy development habits aren’t encouraged. Yet large language models entail both risk and speed.
Not being a vibe coder myself, I ask Chen what a hallucination looks like when coding compared to text. Is it making things up while still staunchly defending its work?
“It still follows the syntax, the general structure, but sometimes there is logic that is implemented incorrectly. There are libraries it tries to import that don’t exist, etc. The funny thing about vibe coding when it comes to the software development process is that errors are caught almost immediately by a compiler and by the runtime. The errors are very, very extensive, where the LLM can pick them up and then fix them right away.”
The experience is less about sifting through lines looking for a missing semicolon, and more about the ability to “triangulate very quickly” and allow the LLM to correct itself.
What do people actually build?
For all the talk about productivity, it’s the results that count. Chen describes the range, from decentralized farming applications to professional trading automation tools, mini casino games and “really cool, visual, artistic applications.”
The dynamics are intoxicating: a dev culture that rapidly remixes itself with new primitives:
“It varies so much from gaming to trading-related improvements, agent trading, etc.”
And how does iBuild generate income from the platform? It’s a very “transparent” model, says Chen, another legacy of Web3 values:
“It’s pay-as-you-go. You pay based on your API usage, so it’s not about paying a monthly fee.”
So, with all the newcomers in this new “coding by vibes” wave, where does Injective stand out? He explains:
“Injective has a MultiVM environment, so this means there is an additional web assembly environment that actually uses Rust, which is a very, very secure language and prevents many vibe coding solutions from writing unsafe code.”
Even more important:
“There are built-in financial modules, chain-level components like the exchange module, that are completely secure, and there’s no way misconfigured applications can interact with them in an insecure way.”
And the ecosystem is only growing. Injective recently launched its EVM and “dozens and dozens of exciting partners” are deploying on top of Injective every day.
“The EVM opens up to the millions of developers and potentially billions of users, virtual machine environments for smart contracts, performance, exchange and financial layers that form its backbone.”
Coding at the pace of memes
Vibe coding isn’t just a word of the year curiosity. It’s about remapping who gets to build, how quickly ideas move from the whiteboard to the mainnet, and what’s possible when teams like Injective put power tools in the hands of everyone, regardless of their coding background.
When the means of creating software evolve so quickly and the barriers to entry are removed, the pace of development will go up and to the right. The only way to keep up? It could just be (dare I say it?) that it fits the atmosphere.