Vibe coding: Game-changer or risky business?

What if you could use Photoshop, Excel or Premiere Pro without paying for any of them? Well, one software engineer is trying to make that possible with the help of AI. His name is Brandon Thomas and he's created free alternatives to some of Adobe's most popular programs and he didn't just stop there. He's now taking on Microsoft with his own versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All available for free, no catch. So how's he doing all this? With something called vibe coding and it's actually pretty simple and kind of cool instead of spending months trying to write a computer code you just tell AI what you want to build and it generates the code for you think of it like ordering food at a restaurant instead of taking time looking through the menu you just tell the chef exactly what you want and they'd make it for you from scratch thomas who's been a software engineer for 15 years used Anthropic's Claude to help develop his applications because he's fed up with expensive software fees and subscriptions now here's where things get quite interesting vibe coding could make building software cheaper faster and more accessible but there's a catch actually several first AI can make mistakes so it's not always reliable it can contain bugs security vulnerabilities and potentially expose sensitive information and then we have the legal side of things what happens if AI copies someone else's copyrighted work or if you create an application that looks and functions exactly like an existing one that could possibly lead to legal trouble also who ends up owning the code that AI creates the law isn't clear on that point yet as for Brandon Thomas he says his applications were built completely from scratch without copying any codes but that claim hasn't been independently established but for someone who has never used adobe before they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the original and thomas's replacement but this whole ai vibe coding thing raises a much bigger question is vibe coding a win for consumers over big tech or could it come at a cost threatening jobs and opening a door to more data leaks and security risks