Vibe Coding on Rented Ground

Let me say the obvious part first, so you know where I stand. I use these tools. I build with them. I think they're genuinely remarkable, and I'm not here to tell you the emperor has no clothes. He has plenty of clothes. That's exactly why I've been thinking about what happens when the bill for them finally comes.

Right now the world has discovered vibe coding. You describe an app in plain language and something builds it for you. Overnight, everyone is a founder. My feed is full of people shipping a product over a weekend and doing the mental math on their first million. The barrier to building software has basically collapsed, and that is a real, historic shift. I don't want to undersell it.

But watch the mindset that came with it. Almost everyone has defaulted to the same dream: build an app, put it out there, get rich. And that's the part I'd push back on, because it quietly assumes something that isn't true. It assumes you own what you're building.

You mostly don't. You're building on rented ground.

Here's what I mean, and it comes in two layers.

The first is the economics. Every one of these tools now bills by tokens, and the prices have already moved more than once in a single year. The cheap tiers everyone is building on are not priced to make money. They're priced to win the market, to get you in and get you dependent while the land grab is on. It's the same pattern I wrote about with the Gulf AI buildout: acquisition first, economics later. Which is fine, until later arrives. When these providers eventually have to turn adoption into profit, the number that changes is the one your whole business plan quietly rests on. You don't control it. You never did.

The second layer is ownership of the thing itself. When your product is generated by, and often runs on top of, someone else's platform, you're carrying a dependency you didn't fully price in. Today nobody's asking hard questions about who owns what. But these are companies in their adoption phase, being generous, being permissive, because that's what you do when you're buying market share. The terms you build under today are the terms most likely to tighten the day they need to show returns. I'm not predicting a specific clawback. I'm saying that when your livelihood sits on top of somebody else's platform and somebody else's pricing, you should at least know that's the deal you took.

So here's the honest math nobody puts in the "I built a startup in a weekend" post. The tool is twenty dollars. The real thing, once it has to handle real users and real money and real security, costs vastly more, and most of that cost shows up after the fun part is over. The weekend gets you a demo. The business is the other ninety percent, and that part hasn't changed.

None of this means don't build. I build constantly. It means change what you're building for.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: don't try to get rich with these tools. Try to get free with them.

Everything I make is grounded in automation, tools that take something tedious out of my own life and week, and just quietly do it. That value is real the moment it exists. It doesn't need an app store, or a viral launch, or ten thousand users, or a pricing page staying cheap forever. It works for me on day one, and it keeps working regardless of what any provider decides to do next. Some of it I'll make accessible to other people, because if it's useful to me it's probably useful to someone else. But I'm building from ownership, not dependency. The value lands with me first.

That's the quiet difference between the two ways of using this moment. One chases a fortune on ground you don't own, priced by someone who hasn't figured out their own business model yet. The other uses the same tools to make your own life measurably better, and keeps the value no matter what happens to the market underneath.

The gold rush framing is the one everyone reached for by default. I'd just gently point out who got rich in most gold rushes. It wasn't the miners. It was the people selling them the tools.