Vibe coding, no-code, and the new rules of web3 development

Welcome to Slate Sunday, CryptoSlate’s weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore 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, caught Karim’s thread about it reshaping web3, or even noticed that Collins Dictionary anointed it as their Word of the Year. But strip away the hype, what is vibe coding actually making possible? And who are the people putting it to real work?

To find out, I caught up with Eric Chen, cofounder of Injective, whose team just dropped a barrage of new products, including iBuild, an AI-powered development platform that lets you build and deploy apps without writing a line of code.

Chen launches into our conversation with a mix of unfiltered excitement and grounded pragmatism, traits that might as well be prerequisites for surviving in this industry’s perpetual cyclone.

What is vibe coding, and why is everyone suddenly talking about it?

Vibe coding, in the simplest terms, is “for almost everyone.” At least, that’s Chen’s take.

The vision is that frictionless: a kind of ChatGPT for coding. The user describes what they want with everyday language, and the system (part conversational AI, part full-stack dev toolkit) scaffolds the bones of a working application, sometimes within minutes.

So, does vibe coding replace developers completely, then? Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. Actually, it works as something of an “optimizer.” Chen explains:

That’s not just talk from the valley. According to recent surveys, nearly 75% of developers at early-stage startups now use some flavor of vibe coding in their workflow, with more than half claiming it increases their delivery velocity by at least 30%. And yes, the meme is real: even “a quarter of Y Combinator startups now get their MVPs off the ground using vibe coding platforms.”​

Injective’s iBuild: Shipping product at lightning speed

Still, buzzwords 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:

What Chen says happened next feels like the purest form of collaborative R&D:

The examples keep on coming. Chen talks about an app called Pushin’ P that he also created in minutes that went viral. He laughs:

Indeed, and that appears to be a rolling theme surrounding anything AI development: unleashing mysterious forces that no one fully understands how to decode.

The upshot? What was once a process beset by arcane syntax, libraries, and deployment headaches now happens “with zero barriers to entry.”

In one recent competition Injective ran, Eric shares, roughly 20 websites got deployed within 24 hours from community members building different types of websites and launching full production apps.

From sandbox to mainnet: Why safety still matters

The concern that often dogs AI-powered dev tools, especially those wielding as much automation as iBuild, is safety. If anyone can spin up smart contracts or financial primitives with a prompt and a click, what stops the whole system from becoming the next honeypot for exploits? Chen doesn’t dodge the question.

What makes Injective’s approach safer, he explains, is its fully audited modules that detect fraudulent activity or bad code and stop them in their tracks. He says:

So even if the AI hallucinates and produces wonky code, transfers, payments, and financial rails are nailed down at the protocol level.

AI: Friend, foe, and productivity multiplier

Vibe coding not only accelerates novices, but has become table stakes for serious developers, a sign of the times we’re living in:

But, as with all powerful accelerants, moderation is key, Chen points out:

Most experienced coders quickly know exactly what that point is, he says, and the platform itself is careful not to encourage lazy development habits. Yet, large language models bring risk as well as speed.

Not yet a vibe coder myself, I ask Chen what a hallucination looks like in coding compared to text. Does it make stuff up while still doggedly defending its work?

The experience is less about combing through lines for a missing semicolon, and more about being able to “triangulate very quickly” and allow the LLM to course correct itself.

So, what are people actually building?

For all the talk of productivity, what counts are the results. Chen describes the range, from farming decentralized applications to professional tools for trading automation, mini casino games, and “really cool, visual, artistic applications.”

The dynamic is intoxicating: a dev culture remixing itself with new primitives at light speed:

And how does iBuild monetize the platform? It’s a very “transparent” model, says Chen, another legacy of web3 values:

So, with all the entrants in this new “coding by vibes” wave, where does Injective stand out? He explains:

More importantly:

And the ecosystem is only growing. Injective recently launched its EVM, and “dozens and dozens of exciting partners” are deploying on top of Injective every single day.

Coding at the pace of memes

Vibe coding isn’t just a word-of-the-year curiosity. It’s remapping who gets to build, how fast ideas go from whiteboard to mainnet, and what’s possible when teams like Injective put power tools in the hands of anyone, regardless of their coding pedigree.

When the means of software creation move this fast, and the barriers to entry are obliterated, the pace of development will go up and to the right. The only way to keep up? It might just be (dare I say it?) to go with the vibe.

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