If you have read my previous pieces, you already know the drill. I work as a network engineer during the day, and I spend my evenings running a handful of side businesses and messing around with AI through vibe coding. I do it partly for the money, but honestly, the more I learn about how this technology is moving, the more it just turns into pure fun for me. I did not even notice the date creeping up on me, but I recently realized it has officially been one year since I started vibe coding. I have not built some runaway success story here, and my numbers are nowhere near astronomical. But today I want to be honest about what that year really taught me.
Running Toward The Dangerous Edge
A lot of my friends are the type who either trade Bitcoin or launch their own startups. Most of them lean toward risk over stability, and if I am being honest with myself, I probably carry a version of that same instinct. Society does not always look kindly on people like this. But if I had to name their one real strength, it is that they are always the first ones sprinting toward whatever is hottest at the cutting edge of things, just to feel it firsthand and adapt before everyone else catches up.
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| Some people test the water, mine test the height |
That is probably why vibe coding has taken over almost every dinner conversation with these friends lately. Most of them are not developers. They have never written a single line of code in their lives. But the moment they got a taste of vibe coding, something shifted, and they started telling me this is something everyone needs to try. These are people who never touched JavaScript or C and never even considered trying. Yet once they saw they could build a working program just by talking to an AI, they became convinced they were watching something capable of reshaping the world fast.
A Free Money Printing Machine
A while back, an older friend of mine mentioned he was making money by writing solid code for crypto exchanges like Binance. My first reaction was that it sounded like a scam. I told him I was not interested, but he explained he had built the whole thing through vibe coding and offered to just hand me the program so I could test it myself. It was free, so I did not say no.
Here is the mechanism behind it. You can buy the exact same Bitcoin on Binance, Coinbase, or OKX, and you can always move it between exchanges afterward. A smaller, lesser known exchange was running a promotion to pull in new users. If you sold coins on their platform that you had bought somewhere else, they paid you a reward worth 1.25 percent of the sale amount. That sounds tiny until you run the actual math. 1.25 percent of 100,000 dollars is 1,250 dollars.
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| The code just sits there, watching, waiting to strike |
The program he built automated the part that normally demands a human sitting there all day watching price movements across exchanges, selling the moment the gap widened enough, then repeating that loop endlessly. I do not know every detail of the logic he wrote, but from what I can tell, it only fires when the price gap between exchanges crosses a certain threshold, then just keeps circling back to check again. I will leave out the name of the exchange so this does not read like an ad.
Ideas Become The Ultimate Currency
A few weeks into running the program he gave me, it is genuinely making money. But what really stopped me in my tracks was not the profit. It was the fact that this guy has zero coding background whatsoever. It was proof of something I had already argued in AI Proves Real Developer Skill Was Never About Code, that the code itself was never the actual skill worth having. What I learned here goes way beyond whether vibe coding can make you money. I learned it can make almost any idea executable, period. Up until now I had only ever thought about running AI projects the traditional way, apps, websites, the usual startup playbook. But watching someone spot an opportunity the way he did showed me that vibe coding can turn almost anything you can imagine into something real.
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| Plenty of altitude, no idea how to land |
There are endless ideas floating around in the world. The problem was always that testing whether a brilliant idea really worked required both money and time. Spotting the kind of idea truly worth executing is its own separate skill, one I broke down in How to Find a Winning Business Idea as a Solo Founder With AI. I knew this guy had plenty of ideas long before this. He just never had a way to act on them, since execution needed capital and hours he did not have, especially with a day job already eating most of his time.
But now, AI lets you build almost anything nearly instantly, without spending much money or time at all, as long as you have the idea. In other words, the value of a genuinely sharp idea just went up dramatically. People used to pay each other to learn technical skills. Lately I am starting to think we might soon be paying each other just to buy ideas instead. If that friend had not handed me his program for free, I never would have made a dollar from any of this. If he had charged me to teach me his method, he would have built himself a second income stream on top of the first. I got lucky because he likes me enough to give it away. But I have a feeling the day is coming when people will pay real money just to get their hands on ideas like his.
It Is Never Too Late
I happen to know a lot of people like this, so information like this reaches me easily. But from where most people with ordinary jobs are standing, the entire concept of vibe coding still feels like a foreign language. I think there are still a huge number of people out there who have no clue this world already exists.
Even so, when I look at the vibe coding space right now, it still feels remarkably early from where the general public sits. It is a stage with almost no real structure, no established rules, and nothing locked in yet. I really do not think it is too late.
Maybe the most powerful move right now is to stop overthinking the whole thing and just start building for the fun of it, before you start chasing the money at all.
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