Welcome to Slate Sunday, CryptoSlate’s weekly feature with in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the headlines and explores the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.
If you’ve been anywhere near tech Twitter this year, you’ve probably heard someone talk about “vibe coding.” Maybe you scrolled past the viral memes, saw Karim’s thread about the web3 redesign, or even noticed that Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year. But hype aside: What actually makes Vibe Coding possible? And who are the people who actually implement it?
To find out, I caught up with Injective co-founder Eric Chen, whose team just launched a flurry of new products including iBuild, an AI-powered development platform that lets you build and deploy apps without writing a line of code.
Understanding Vibe Coding and its Potential
Chen begins our conversation with a mix of unfiltered enthusiasm and grounded pragmatism, qualities that might as well be prerequisites for survival in the eternal whirlwind of this industry.
In the simplest terms, vibe coding is for “almost everyone.” At least that’s Chen’s opinion. “If you are a complete beginner in software development, Vibe Coding is your gateway to building your very first application and shipping… very exciting products with just very simple text commands.”
The vision is so smooth: a kind of ChatGPT for coding. The user describes what they want in everyday language, and the system (part conversational AI, part full-stack developer toolkit) builds the skeleton of a working application, sometimes in minutes.
iBuild by Injective: A Platform for Rapid Development
Still, catchphrases aren’t enough for Chen; he wants receipts. Enter Injective’s iBuild platform, a showcase for how vibe coding works beyond the hypothetical. He shares: “I demoed this with the community the other day before the release… So I just went on Twitter and told them, ‘Hey, do you guys have any ideas?’ Then I can create it and then present it within minutes.”
What happened next, according to Chen, appears to be the purest form of collaborative research and development: “I initially built an on-chain lottery app in a matter of minutes using iBuild and then managed to ship it. Later it actually became a production game developed by Hyper Ninjas because they saw the idea and loved it.”
Security and the Future of Vibe Coding
The concern that often dogges AI-powered development tools, especially those as highly automated as iBuild, is security. If someone can launch smart contracts or financial primitives with a click and a command prompt, what’s to stop the entire system from becoming the next honeypot for exploits? Chen doesn’t avoid the question.
“It really depends on the complexity of the application… and the user should decide for themselves what the risk parameter is.” What makes Injective’s approach more secure, he explains, are the fully audited modules that detect fraudulent activity or bad code and nip them in the bud.
The Impact of Vibe Coding on Development
Vibe coding not only speeds up beginners, but it has also become an important topic for serious developers, a sign of the times we live in: “AI is like a part of a developer’s everyday life. It allows them to autocomplete much of the code they want to write. If it deviates slightly from your logic, you can fix the problem pretty quickly.”
But as with all powerful accelerators, moderation is the key to success, emphasizes Chen: “There is an efficiency limit or sweet spot where you use it enough to increase productivity. But if you use it beyond that point, it actually impacts your productivity and safety.”
Conclusion and the Future of Web3 Development
Vibe coding isn’t just a word of the year oddity. It’s about reallocating who gets to build, how quickly ideas move from the whiteboard to the mainnet, and what’s possible when teams like Injective put power tools in the hands of everyone, regardless of their programming pedigree.
If the means of creating software evolves so quickly and the barriers to entry are removed, the pace of development will move up and to the right. The only way to keep up? It could just be (dare I say it?) the mood.
Read more about Vibe Coding and its impact on the future of web3 development at https://cryptoslate.com/vibe-coding-no-code-and-the-new-rules-of-web3-development/
