Vibe Coding for Designers: The Real Risk Nobody Talks About

I Vibe Coded more pet projects in 3 months than I built in the year before. And it made me more convinced than ever that not everyone should.

I hear it everywhere: "Soon everyone will just build their own apps, thanks to Vibe Coding."

But honestly? I think that's nonsense.

With the same logic, we'd all 3D-print our own homes (because we can use a floor plan app, right?) or cut our own hair after watching a few tutorials.
We don't – or rather, some of us try, realize the limits, and go back to the professional. Because we live in a society built on specialization. Some people get really, really good at certain things, and they do them faster and better than the rest of us.

UX/UI is no different.

→ Don't get me wrong: democratizing design and development is a good thing. My concern is that we're not actually democratizing design and development – we're democratizing a perceived shortcut to the result.

Here's what I've realized:

The clients now Vibe-Coding their own solutions entirely on their own? They were probably never our clients. They're more likely the ones who used to rely on website builders and no-code tools before. And if that meets their needs, that's completely fine – in fact, it's a win.

The clients who do hire us understand something fundamental:

• The value of design doesn't lie in visual aesthetics and features alone – it lies in the process of understanding (aka User Centricity).

• The value of interfaces isn't in the code itself - it's in a deep grasp of users and the medium (usability, best practices, accessibility, privacy compliance, security... you get the idea).

And that's where both the risk and the opportunity live.

🔴 The Risk: If everyone thinks they can skip straight to the result – without understanding the problem they're solving, without knowing their audience, without the ability to evaluate quality (design, security, accessibility...) – we end up drowning in AI slop. And people are already tired of that. A tool doesn't replace judgment. It amplifies it. For better or worse.

🟢 The Opportunity: When you combine deep knowledge of the entire process with the blazing speed of generative AI, you can go further, faster – and deliver more efficient, often better results. And entirely new players enter the field: domain experts who could never build before, now can. That expands the market, it doesn't just redistribute it.

So where do I see the real potential of Vibe Coding right now?

1. Domain experts with deep specialized knowledge who can now build their own tools without having to laboriously translate their expertise to product teams first – a doctor prototyping a patient-facing tool, an analyst building their own dashboard. If they have the time and resources to do that on top of their work, this is genuinely powerful.

2. People with product development expertise (UX designers, for example) who gain implementation speed and new capabilities through AI – because they know how to steer it, critique it, and refine it.

For everyone else? Vibe Coding is the new sourdough: everyone tried it during a moment of enthusiasm (or lockdown), most results were mediocre, a few discovered a genuine passion – and the good bakeries are still fully booked.

Vibe coding is a direct expression of the democratization of production. It's also accelerating the trend of designers coding and developers designing — and that's a good thing.