What is the next big narrative in the AI track? A review of the vibe coding projects worth following.

At the beginning of this year, "vibe coding" gradually became one of the popular discussion topics in the AI circle. In the crypto world, as Bitcoin remains strong, the desire for alt season is growing stronger. The AI track in the crypto world has gone through two waves of hot trends with AI meme and AI Agent, shifting from "meme trading" to "framework trading," and the exploration of new narratives in AI has never stopped.

"vibe coding", could this concept be a groundbreaking narrative for the crypto world AI track?

What is vibe coding?

This concept was proposed by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in a tweet on February 3 of this year:

Andrej Karpathy describes "vibe coding" as follows:

I call this entirely new programming approach "vibe coding": being fully immersed in the atmosphere, letting go of myself, and even forgetting that I am writing code. This is possible because today's large language models (like Cursor Composer paired with Sonnet) have become unimaginably powerful. I hardly type anymore; instead, I directly converse with Composer using SuperWhisper. I make extremely casual, lazy requests, like "reduce the padding of the sidebar by half," because I'm too lazy to locate where to change it myself. I tend to directly "accept all" AI-generated modifications, not even bothering to check the diff. When I encounter error messages, I simply copy and paste them to AI without writing any comments, and in most cases, it can fix the issue. The amount of code has become so large that it exceeds what I can quickly understand, requiring a lot of time to fully comprehend. Sometimes AI cannot solve the bugs, so I just bypass them or randomly make some changes until the problem disappears. For those weekend side projects, this approach is completely fine and even quite interesting. I can say that I am indeed working on a project or web application, but it no longer resembles traditional "programming": I simply identify the problem, state the requirements, run the results, copy, and paste, and the entire process can get most functionalities up and running.

In short, "vibe coding" is a development approach that minimizes the technical programming threshold required to create applications. The programming language you use is the language you communicate and interact with in your daily life. Tell the AI what you need, and it will whip up a usable application for you.

Existing vibe coding projects in the crypto world

dev.fun

The platform officially launched in January this year and received investment from Colosseum in March.

You just need to describe your needs verbally on the platform, and it will automatically start writing code and present a usable App. For example, I asked the platform to help me create a jumping game, and the initial result is as follows:

I paid 0.01 SOL to have the platform modify this initial version,提出了 3 个要求，分别是添加背景、添加音效以及取消蓄力跳跃机制，这些要求都得到了满足。

Once the App has been repeatedly modified and polished to satisfaction, you can choose to issue a coin for the App itself on pump.fun, or associate it with a certain coin on pump.fun.

This mechanism means that applications produced by dev.fun can capture value as individuals, and can also create content or functions around a specific coin, and there may even be situations where "coding guilds" emerge. For example, the currently highest market value token $buidl is a DAO + project incubator, and successful projects that have appeared on dev.fun so far, such as $ZALA and $dab, have all been incubated by buidlDAO.

$buidl currently has a market value of less than 3 million dollars, and its prominence on dev.fun can be attributed not only to the success of past incubations but also to the close interaction between the dev.fun team and the project, with team members frequently mentioning it in their daily tweets. Given this positioning of the incubator, it is perceived by the market as a "semi-official" coin. (Note: buidl is not the official token of dev.fun, and dev.fun currently does not have an official token.)

buildDAO is one of the only 5 accounts followed by the official Twitter of dev.fun.

The logo of buildDAO also appeared on the cover of the Messari report.

Another impressive aspect of $buidl is that they have created a Twitter bot @buidldev. You just need to @ this bot on Twitter and describe your application needs, and the bot will automatically create an application on dev.fun. It's not that others don't have it; Ohara mentioned below also has this feature, but this one is officially developed. So this gives everyone some room for imagination...

Back to dev.fun itself, the people at Colosseum have always been quite supportive of dev.fun. For example, @crabbylions initiated the $RICK hackathon on dev.fun:

There have been quite a few related tweets about奶 dev.fun recently.

Currently, there are over 21,800 applications on dev.fun. Last month, dev.fun updated its support for building dApps on the Solana chain:

poof.new

poof.new has received support from AllianceDAO. Compared to dev.fun, it does not have bundled tokens with the project and focuses solely on building dApps on Solana.

Case of the Solana tipping and rewards platform on poof.new

Remix

Remix has received support from Base, Lemniscap, and Variant Fund. This is a vibe coding platform focused on gaming, where users can either start from scratch to describe their needs to the platform to directly create games, or mix their own games with those from other developers to produce a more innovative version.

To date, Remix has over 500,000 players, more than 800 games, and over 18 million play sessions.

In terms of app discovery, Remix also stands out, as its homepage resembles a game marketplace.

It is also worth mentioning that Remix has a points system related to airdrops, where activities such as creating games, playing games, and evaluating games will earn Remix points.

Ohara

This platform is overall quite similar to dev.fun, and the Apps created also have coins, but it is not linked to pump.fun like dev.fun; instead, it has its own built-in launchpad. Furthermore, this platform is on Base.

The token with the highest market value on the platform is a meme coin called $HELLOWORLD, which, when clicked, redirects to the homepage of Ohara. This is also the platform's first token, currently valued at approximately 2.6 million dollars.

Alchemist AI

This platform has issued the token $ALCH. Compared to the projects mentioned above, I think its biggest difference lies in the overall design of the economic mechanism. Creating apps on Alchemist AI requires the use of $ALCH, and it also has a built-in application trading market where $ALCH can be used for buying and selling.

I personally believe that this approach is relatively traditional and not suitable for the crypto world, and I will continue to discuss this in the following text.

Vibe Coding Platform and Crypto World Adaptation Points

Through the above projects, we can see that all of these vibe coding platforms can produce Apps that are actually lightweight applications. Their advantage lies in the fact that if I have a sudden and not too complicated idea today, I can immediately implement it and deliver it to the market, without getting tangled up in how to realize it, just needing to focus all my time and energy on the idea.

In fact, the vibe coding within the developer community is more often used to implement MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or as programming assistance (refining or modifying AI-generated code results to enhance development efficiency). When it comes to complex ideas and hard requirements in terms of performance, security, and other aspects, the current level of technology still cannot solve it in one sentence with the help of AI.

For developers, vibe coding may currently only improve work efficiency, but in the crypto world, this is another liberation on the "content creation" level. Yes, if we don't see vibe coding as programming but as a form of content creation, its potential in the crypto world will be significant.

The meme coin sector is actually continuously evolving, and with each bull market, there is almost always an improvement in the productivity of meme coins themselves. For example, during the last major bull market for meme coins, pump.fun allowed everyone to issue their own meme coins at almost no cost. Now, everyone has long been accustomed to this, but back in 2023, I wrote an article titled "实测｜在 Base 上发行一个 meme，需要花多少钱？" At that time, creating meme coins still had certain barriers.

The capabilities of the vibe coding platform significantly lower the barriers to content creation. Whether you want to create a meme website or develop a data dashboard around a specific token, it has become very easy. Therefore, the potential of the vibe coding platform lies not in "being able to create apps with impressive practical utility"—which is absolutely impossible for even professional developers or development teams—but in "being able to create content with more diverse experiences." For example, on pump.fun there are live streams; using these platforms to create a website that detects how many times "I grass" was said during the live stream, automatically destroying some coins each time it is recorded, and similar attention-grabbing "content."

On dev.fun, they also support rewarding users to develop features for specific themed apps, which could very well become one of the ways for the next project's cold start.

In summary, meme coins have developed to this day, and they are not actually "valueless" but rather "value of hype." The memes we are familiar with, such as "666," were not profitable for the first person who invented this usage, but meme coins can solve this problem. Vibe coding has the ability to act as an "amplifier" for viral content, and bundling it with coins allows for better pricing and monetization of content creation.

Will vibe coding become as popular as AI Agents?

On the narrative level, I personally think that vibe coding is not as grand as AI Agent, after all, AI Agent represents a "breakthrough narrative" of "allowing AI to autonomously handle affairs like humans," while vibe coding is about "enhancing content creation ability." The shock value of this, at first glance, is simply different.

From the financing situation, we can also assess the power of narrative. According to data from Laimi PEVC, since 2024, the financing amount in the global AI Agent sector has exceeded 66.5 billion RMB. Web2 AI Agent companies like Adept AI and Inflection AI have once attracted hundreds of millions or even over 1 billion USD in large financing. In contrast, vibe coding is somewhat weaker, but still has potential. Loveable raised 15 million USD in its seed round in February 2024, but the Financial Times reported rumors that Loveable's new round of financing will exceed 150 million USD. Replit's cumulative financing amount is approximately 270 million USD, and bolt.new also announced early this year that it secured 105.5 million USD in Series B financing.

From Google's search trends, vibe coding (the orange curve in the chart below) made a breakthrough in early March this year, nearly reaching the search level of the "AI Agent" keyword during last year's crypto world AI Agent bull market (November 2024 to January 2025), as shown by the blue curve in the chart below.

From the perspective of actual user perception, the vibe coding concept aims to combine narrative in a way that gives users a refreshing sense of amazement and breakthrough, similar to the previous AI meme or the AI Agent era's aixbt. However, it currently seems quite difficult. If the vibe coding concept were to become a huge hit, a more likely route would be the platform value discovery brought about by rising prices, much like the various Launchpads that were popular during the AI Agent era.

Compared to AI Agents, vibe coding excels in its "novelty"; its narrative has just started to gain popularity in the Web2 space. The concept of AI Agents has actually built up momentum for quite a long time, from its emergence to its rise and then to the big market trends in the crypto world. It's equally understandable that "even those who don’t know programming can make money with programs." At the same time, it has not yet entered, nor will it enter, the fatigue phase of narrative that requires practical exploration, because the existing products can indeed produce results; it’s just a matter of how complex and large-scale the applications can evolve into over time.

If Bitcoin remains strong and this year's alt season arrives as expected, the vibe coding concept is likely to make breakthroughs.