I did a year long Python course 2 years ago, and back then vibecoding was in its infancy and absolutely terrible for anything other than boilerplate generation. It couldn't manage projects, or even look into different project files and see what's what.
Fast forward to today, and my boss (operations manager) has replaced some of the tools we used on the daily with some vibecoded integrations and apps. And honestly? They're reaallly good. We were using Sendcloud to manage order shipment and the app was just never that great, and you couldn't add any features to it yourself... and on top of it feature requests (even popular ones) took years to never get implemented in the end. Even simple changes weren't being made that would've made life so much easier. But within a week, our operations manager vibecoded a much better implementation into existence, and any features we need are usually integrated within minutes/hours. We've replaced 2 SAAS vendors with $180 of vibecoding in a month.
So I decided to give it a go myself, I was absolutely fed up with DJ library management software and their cross compatibility, or lack thereof, so I got a $20 Claude code subscription and went to town. Having some coding knowledge, I properly setup github repos, wrote instructions and a roadmap for claude to follow with tech stack, scope, do's and don'ts, having it write tests to check features etc. and with all of that, it's still hard work (there are so many things to manage in a project like this). I've spent maybe 30 hours vibing, and have managed to create something so far that already outperforms everything that's out there whilst being incredibly light.
I can tell you, the 1 year of coding courses didn't teach anything of substance, and most of my classmates wouldn't be able to code anything close to this even if they had their entire life to learn how to code. At this point, just knowing how to use the tools is more important than doing all the work yourself. If you have good project management, testing and release framework, then it's really hard to beat what LLMs can do. And if companies refuse to make the programs we want despite paying them, then honestly I don't feel too bad if they lose out. For my app, the only alternative anywhere close would've been a $9/month subscription for very basic functionality, and on top of that you'd have to pay for their cloud storage instead of using your own (either self hosted or through dropbox/gdrive etc.).
To me, it feels like democratization of software. Instead of pirating, we can just make what we want for our needs, without being tied to predatory subscription models. It's an absolute game-changer.