Any IDE based editor feels like a stopgap to me. We may not be there yet, but I feel that in the future a "vibe coder" isn't even going to look at much code at all. Much of what developers who are relying on Cursor, Windmill, Replit, etc etc are doing is performative as it relates to code. There is just a lot of copy/pasting of console errors and asking for things one way or another.
Casual or "vibe" coding is all about the output. Doesn't work? Roll back. Works well? Keep going. Feeling gutsy? Single shot.
Vibe coding is just a prototyping tool / "dev influencer" gimmick. No one serious is using Cursor for vibe coding, nor will anyone serious ever vibe code. It's for AI assisted development-- in other words, a more powerful intellisense.
I vibed this puzzle game into existence with two breaks* from vibe coding midway through to get it out of a rut: https://love-15.com/
It builds for PC, web, iOS and Android.
It's a simple sliding block puzzle game with a handful of additional game mechanics which you can see if you go into settings to unlock all levels, saved progress and best times/move counts, a level editor, daily puzzles with share results, and theme selection.
I think I found the current limits of vibe coding. There's one bug that I know of which I don't think can be fixed with vibe coding, and so I haven't fixed it as this was largely an experiment to see how far you could get with vibe coding.
I've since inspected the code and I believe the code is just too bad for the LLM to get anywhere at this point. Looking at the git history - I had it commit every time a feature was complete and verified working by me - the code started OK but really went downhill as it got bigger, and it got worse faster over time.
(When I first broke from vibe coding it was hitting a brick wall on progress earlier than expected and I needed to guide it to break the project up into more files, which it is terrible at by the way; I think the one giant file was hitting context length limits, which were smaller at the time than they are now. The second break was at the end to get it over the finish line when it just could not fix some save bugs without introducing new ones, and I did just barely enough technical guidance to help it finish. In neither case did I write code, but I did read code in both cases.)
I felt the same way for a while, but I am really not so sure now. Cursor is definitely drawing on the influencer/growth well to drive some portion of these #s.
It's a lot easier and more scaleable to get 1000 people "vibe coding" than it is to get 10 experienced engineers using you for autocomplete.
Cursor isnt for vibe coding. I use it. I ask the AI to do something I know how to do but it can do it faster. I check the changes to make sure everything looks good.
But this sums up so well why I think the valuation is so riskily high. You're saying that right now IDE UX is so slow and bad that often there are changes you know how to make but it would literally just be too many keystrokes for you to want to do yourself.
As far as I can tell if people like you just had a way to express code ideas with fewer keystrokes, a lot of Cursor's market would pretty much just dry up.
Casual or "vibe" coding is all about the output. Doesn't work? Roll back. Works well? Keep going. Feeling gutsy? Single shot.