Vibecoding is self-expression
My fiancée and I recently used Lovable to build an event site to collect RSVPs. We could have used Partiful, Paperless Post, or dozens of other tools to whip something together in 10 minutes. Instead, we spent a few hours prompting, tweaking, laughing at weird outputs, and making something that felt like ours.
Functionally it was inferior to a polished event platform, but the end result was more meaningful and fun to create. That experience highlights something new: software creation itself is becoming the product.
Vibecoding is a form of self-expression. Creating software went from tedious to fun. It’s as much entertainment as it is function. And as a result, the durability of a large class of consumer software is in question.
New competition for consumer utilities
There’s a lot of chatter about the “death of SaaS”. Most of the debate is on B2B and their decaying moats. But consumer utilities may be even more exposed.
In B2B, software selection is constrained by trust, security, integration complexity, and organizational inertia. Consumer is different.
For many consumer use cases, the job to be done is no longer just functional. It’s emotional. It’s expressive. Consumer demand shifts from utility to self-expression and entertainment. Software stops being purely a time-saving device and starts becoming a time-spending activity. The value isn’t only in the output. It’s in the act of making it.
Of course this isn’t new. People rebuild the same habit tracker in Notion, constantly redesign their link-in-bio pages, and craft hyper-personalized workout planners in Google Sheets instead of downloading a tracking app.
But software as self-expression is expanding as vibecoding unlocks more use cases for the masses.
So, what’s defensible?
If vibecoding makes software easier to create, feature advantages collapse even faster. Things that remain defensible in consumer utilities:
- Social graphs. At its core, LinkedIn is a simple online resume to showcase where you’ve worked but the real value is in the network and the (correct, at least in tech) assumption that most professionals are using it to research people.
- Distribution. More than 12 years since its founding, Product Hunt’s distribution flywheel keeps spinning. The core product—a daily leaderboard of product launches—could be vibecoded in a weekend but the value isn’t in the code.
- Licensing and regulations. Spotify succeeded because it was able to secure licenses with major labels, aggregating the world’s music into a single destination. Replicating this is incredibly difficult and time-consuming.
- Data moats. Waze is particularly useful because it collects data from millions of drivers every day to accurately estimate traffic, flag construction routes, and more.
- Hardware. It’s getting easier to build physical products, but it still remains relatively difficult compared to pure software. You can’t (yet) vibe code an Oura Ring.
The most durable products will incorporate more than just one of the above.
Software painting
When I started Product Hunt the bet was that software creation would become more accessible and increasingly serve as a form of self-expression. That’s never been more true today.
We’re all software painters now. What have you made?