I've stopped vibe coding.

Not coding with AI generally. The prompt-to-app weekend habit specifically.
I used to do it constantly. Replit. Lovable. Bolt. Every weekend a new app. Every other Tuesday a new internal tool.

Then I noticed something. None of them ever went anywhere.

Not because they didn't work. They worked fine. They were in the corner. They couldn't talk to my data. They couldn't talk to my business. They couldn't talk to the rest of the things I actually used. So they stayed where they were, and I stopped opening them.

The interesting work isn't generating an app from a prompt. That's the cheap part now. The interesting work is everything that lets a thing actually plug into your life. Auth. Data. Permissions. Memory. Context. Guardrails. The boring stuff that makes a tool useful instead of impressive.

But vibe coding wasn't a fad. It was a rehearsal.

It taught me what I could build. The skill stuck. What I build with it has changed.
I'm building things now that stay close to me. I know set up MCP servers for tools that I hate using. I write scripts that help me do SEO/AEO audits. They don't need to be a separate site that someone visits. Most of them aren't. They sit inside what I already use, doing one specific thing for me.

For a non-tech person, that's the bigger unlock. "I can build an app" was the headline but the actual story is more about how I see my software stack.

The whole vibe coding episode gave me the power to shape the software I work in.