The Rise of Vibecoding: Can It Be Useful for Project Managers?
Vibecoding Growth: Vibecoding has evolved from a niche concept to one gaining attention in tech and business circles.
Project Managers: Project managers, adept at clear communication, are surprisingly suited to excel in vibecoding.
Real-World Examples: Practical applications of vibecoding demonstrate its potential to build tools for niche use cases.
Challenges: While vibecoding accelerates initial development, scaling and quality management remain challenging aspects.
Risks Awareness: Non-technical builders may face risks, including scalability issues and security vulnerabilities, when vibecoding.
Over the last year or two, "vibecoding" has gone from a niche term floating around AI-enthusiast corners of the internet to a concept that's starting to crack the mainstream — at least in tech, business, and productivity circles. Having spent countless hours talking about AI with experts, and being deep in a vibecoding obsession of my own, I've noticed a pattern: vibecoding tends to be the next stop for people who've hit the ceiling of what existing AI tools can do for them. If you can't find what you're looking for, why not just build it yourself?
The catch is that most people I talk to still haven't heard of it. It remains a genuinely niche concept, and one that's rarely discussed in project management circles specifically. So I went looking for the people actually doing it: real project managers and operations leaders who have quietly built vibecoded tools into their day-to-day workflows, and asked them how it's going.
Whether you're a project manager curious about where AI can take you next, or a leader trying to get ahead of what your team might already be experimenting with, consider this your introduction to vibecoding — part inspiration, part warning.
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What is Vibecoding, Anyway?
While there isn’t a formal definition of “vibecoding” yet, since it is a new term, we will define it as such: coding through prompting an LLM using plain language that then outputs code.
For this article’s purpose, I want to also specify that “vibecoding” (at least how I am using the term) is distinct from AI-assisted coding – where a technically skilled developer uses tools like GitHub Copilot to speed up work they already understand how to do.
Why Project Managers Are Surprisingly Well-Suited for This
At first glance, vibecoding might seem like a tool for entrepreneurs or tech-adjacent hobbyists. But the more people I spoke to, the more a different profile emerged: the person thriving at vibecoding isn't necessarily the most technical person in the room. They're the person who's best at knowing what they want and articulating it clearly — which, if you think about it, describes a good project manager almost perfectly.
Tim Fisher, VP of AI at The Digital Project Manager, put it this way: "It's a way to communicate that didn't exist before." He sees vibecoding less as a technical skill and more as a new medium for turning ideas into something tangible. "The value of these tools for non-coders is to be able to shortcut things like alignment around an idea and get past the 'is this going to work?' phase."
Vibecoding is a way to communicate that didn’t exist before.
What Tim described maps neatly onto the PM skill set: Writing requirements, translating business needs into clear specifications, communicating across technical and non-technical teams — these are all things project managers do every day, and they turn out to be exactly what vibecoding rewards.
Aniket Ghonge, Senior Supply Chain Manager at Amazon, described his own path to vibecoding in a way that will resonate with a lot of PMs. Years before agentic AI existed, he helped guide a development team to build an internal tool by writing requirements and describing what he needed. "I didn't build anything. I didn't code anything. I just said, ‘Here's what we need. Here's how it should flow.’ And they built it based on my requirements. But that's where my journey started. Now, with agentic AI, I'm doing the same thing. I'm writing my requirements, but AI is doing the coding.”
The only difference now? He doesn't need a development team.
What Are People Actually Building?
The most compelling evidence for vibecoding's potential isn't theoretical — it's the specific, practical things people have quietly shipped while the rest of us were still debating whether it was worth trying.
Here's a snapshot of what four non-technical practitioners have built:
Dixie Willard, Founder and Chief Project Strategist at Poised and Plum, works primarily with interior designers and built a scope-of-work builder entirely on her own. The app lets a designer walk through a client consultation on a tablet, checking off rooms, selections, and project phases in real time, and generates a clean scope-of-work document on the spot — something that previously required notes, memory, and hours of post-meeting admin work. She built it because nothing like it existed. "There just isn't one. And there are a lot of tools that designers could use that just don't exist." Her take on why vibecoding matters in industries like hers: "I think that the niche use cases are probably the biggest reason to use vibecoding. It just makes life so much easier."
I think that the niche use cases are probably the biggest reason to use vibecoding. It just makes life so much easier.
Aniket Ghonge was spending 16 to 18 hours every week manually processing demand forecasting data for hundreds of shippers across Amazon's logistics network — copying figures across spreadsheets, running calculations by hand, and doing it all again the following week. "It's a manual process. It was taking me about 16 to 18 hours every week. I can't keep manually doing that and making errors because anytime a human touches something at scale, it's going to be error-prone." So, he vibecoded a full web application that now automates most of that work. The comparison to what came before is striking: "A couple of years ago, I had to work with a web developer, a UX designer, a product manager, a technical program manager, a lot of individuals to build a product that my concept was based on. Today, I have no blockers, and within two weeks, I built an application. A similar application I previously supported took two years."
Michael Gold, a Fractional Head of Delivery and Founder at Gold Project Management, built a custom CRM in Lovable that connects to his company website and integrates with Fireflies, his meeting transcription tool. Every morning, he and his business partner run through their pipeline on a call, and when they're done, a single button press does the rest: "I can just click update from transcript, and it automatically goes through the transcript and assigns it to the right person. And it adds notes and tasks and assigns them to us." He has since taken vibecoding further, partnering with a developer to build a full professional services automation tool, now heading toward a public launch.
Harry Max, a fractional executive and author of Managing Priorities, watched his business partner vibecode a sophisticated prioritization platform from scratch over nine months using Claude Code — no development team, no outside investment. The before-and-after comparison Harry offered was hard to ignore: "In nine months, one guy built something as sophisticated as software we built 20 years ago with 14 people and $2 million."
In nine months, one guy built something as sophisticated as we built 20 years ago with 14 people and $2 million.
The Honest Truth: It's Not All Smooth Sailing
Every person I spoke to was genuinely enthusiastic about vibecoding. They were also, without exception, honest about where it gets hard.
The most common experience seems to be a version of what Michael described: "You can get from zero to 60 quicker than ever, but I still think that 60 to 100 is really challenging. If you really want to get it somewhere, it still needs expertise."
Harry Max flagged a subtler trap — the allure of the process itself. "It is very seductive to keep changing things, and every time you change something, something breaks. And you don't find what's broken unless you have really thought through how you're going to manage your quality and testing processes." He also offered a sobering note on outputs that look better than they are: "The fact that you can vibecode stuff that looks beautiful doesn't mean it's useful. It doesn't mean it works. It doesn't mean it solves a problem, but it looks great."
[With vibecoding] you can get from zero to 60 quicker than ever, but I still think that 60 to 100 is really challenging.
Aniket Ghonge learned one of the harder lessons firsthand. In his eagerness to keep building features, he skipped a testing step that cost him dearly: "I suddenly lost my 50% work, and that kind of scared me. That was my hard lesson. Okay, you need to test a feature in a testing environment before you make a change to a production environment." He recovered, but it took hours — and a significant amount of anxiety.
The Risks Non-Technical Builders Don't Always See Coming
The enthusiasm from practitioners is real, but so are the structural risks — and this is where I decided to bring in Tim for an honest technical take.
When I asked Tim what he thought of project managers vibecoding their own tools, his perspective was less about discouraging people and more about making sure they go in with their eyes open. His most important observation: "Generally speaking, if you don't know what you don't know, you cannot assume that the agentic coder is going to fill you in."
That applies to scalability in particular. "Generally speaking, all vibecoded projects are not scalable, mostly because you are not asking the agent to consider scaling. Non-developers probably don't even ask for things like error handling." A vibecoded tool might work perfectly for five users and quietly fall apart at fifty — and the person who built it may have no way of knowing why.
Generally speaking, all vibecoded projects aren'ts scalable, mostly because you are not asking the agent to consider scaling.
Then there's the accountability question, which becomes especially pointed when the tool gets popular inside an organization. "If you build something that people rely on, it needs to become more than just a vibecoded project; it needs to be absorbed by the people that do this professionally and know things that you don't even know to ask." Fisher painted a specific scenario that felt very real: "If somebody asks this person, 'Is this information I'm getting out of your tool accurate?' and they don't know enough about how it works because they allowed the agent to do all the work, then they can't answer that question."
Even Dixie Willard, who is actively building tools she believes in, acknowledged the unease that sits underneath the excitement: "That's the thing that always makes me nervous, because I'm like, what if there's a security issue?"
It's worth noting that security vulnerabilities — exposed API keys, unsecured user data, tools that inadvertently handle PII without proper safeguards — are among the most common pitfalls Tim flagged in our conversation. They're the kind of thing a developer handles as a matter of routine, but that a vibecoder simply might not know to address.
So, Should You Try It?
The honest answer is: it depends on what you're building and what you plan to do with it.
Vibecoding is genuinely powerful as a prototyping and communication tool. If you have an idea, want to test whether it works, or need to show stakeholders something tangible before investing in real development, the ceiling is high, and the risks are manageable. Tim frames it well: the core value is getting past the "is this going to work?" phase faster than was ever previously possible.
Where it gets more complicated is when a vibecoded tool graduates from prototype to something people depend on. At that point, the gaps in scalability, error handling, and security that were fine to ignore at the start start to matter — and the person who built it may not have the technical vocabulary to even know where to look.
The practitioners in this article are all navigating that tension in real time. Some are handing off to developers. Some are learning as they go. All of them are figuring out, one prompt at a time, exactly where the boundaries of this technology sit.
For project managers, the opportunity is real — but so is the responsibility that comes with it. The good news is that knowing what you want, asking the right questions, and understanding when to bring in help are all things good PMs already do. Vibecoding, at its best, is just a new context for the same skills.
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