Vibecoding is really blowing my mind at the moment. Not only was I able to vibe code an invoice fetcher recently, but I also accomplished two other projects since then.

One is an ePaper downloader. In a configured interval, that tool checks three different portals from the local public library to get the latest issues of some configured newspapers and magazines. Previously that was running for one of those portals in a few n8n workflows, but a custom Go-based tool just works better and is more reliable. Like the invoice fetcher, most of the work was achieved by letting the AI reverse-engineer the API requests from an HAR file.

Today, I also finished something that I procrastinated for a long time. My wife and I are renting our flat from my family, so I am basically my own landlord. To be on the safe side legally, we have to do everything like we would do when renting to external people. That includes an annual “Nebenkostenabrechnung” (statement of operating costs), which I haven’t finished for 2025 yet. I could have used a template in a word processor and a spreadsheet but decided to just let the AI build me a simple tool (also Go-based) to create a customized PDF. It also calculates how much my wife and I have to pay or get back. Next year, I just need to change some values in a YAML file and generate a new version. Or when things change, just use a few prompts to adapt it.

But not only is my own vibe coding blowing my mind. One and a half month ago, a project called ArtCraft created some buzz in the media. The project is trying to recreate the tools from the Adobe suite in a “clean room implementation” (so they say they are not using reverse engineering like I did with my tools, but only public documentation, etc.). A few weeks later they also started reimplementing the Microsoft Office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. All written in Rust and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, or as WebAssembly, with much lower resource consumption than the original tools.

I tried a few of those tools, and while they are not at hundred percent feature parity yet and probably still have many bugs, it’s crazy how capable they are already, even though the project is quite young. Not to mention that Adobe’s suite and Microsoft Office have bugs as well. Sure, there are GIMP, Krita, RawTherapee, LibreOffice, Euro-Office, etc. But having another option that is trying to be completely compatible with the original tools, and also available on Linux is nice, though.

Like I said in my last post on that topic, everything seems to be open source now. Using AI, you can reverse engineer or rebuild almost everything now.

As a software developer, I don’t know how to feel about this. Is AI a new superpower tool, or is AI going to replace me? Earlier or later it’s going to replace me doing the coding work, but given that also customers of the software I built at work could theoretically just build their own versions… I doubt that’s very clever when it comes to security, but that’s another topic.

I don’t think custom software development is disappearing anytime soon, but the market is getting tougher. Either you use AI to build faster, or your competitors do.