rewrite this title 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.

“If you’re very much of a beginner, when it comes to software development, vibe coding is your entryway into making your very first application and shipping…very exciting products with just very simple text commands.”

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.

“You can essentially have the starting steps for developing a highly powerful website and turn your ideas into a full-on product within a matter of hours.”

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

“If you’re a very experienced and senior software engineer, vibe coding is even more powerful because it elevates you in terms of development lifecycle, and really accelerates your development process. You know, with just a few sentences of command, you can essentially turn your ideas into a full-on product.”

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:

“I was demoing this with the community the other day, before launch…So I would just go on Twitter and tell them, “Hey, do you guys have any ideas?” Then I can create it and then showcase it within a matter of minutes.”

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

“I initially created an on-chain lottery app using iBuild within a few minutes, and then managed to ship it out, and it actually later on became a production game developed by Hyper Ninjas, because they saw the idea and loved it.”

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

“I think we really opened up a Pandora’s box with iBuild.”

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.

“It really depends on the complexity of the application…and the user should be the judge on what the risk parameter is.”

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:

“You can make all kinds of highly expressive, very interesting applications, but at the same time, there are fixed toolkits and modules that safeguard the user.”

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

“The critical components, like payments, and different types of financial layers are absolutely audited and safe and support tens of billions of dollars of usage volume and also security.”

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:

“AI is like part of a developer’s everyday lifestyle. It allows them to autocomplete a lot of the code that they’re intending to write…if it deviates slightly from your logic, you can fix it fairly quickly.”

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

“There’s an efficient frontier or optimal point, where you use it enough to accelerate productivity. But if you use it past that point, it actually compromises your productivity and safety.”

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?

“It’ll still follow the syntax, the general structure, but sometimes there is logic that is misimplemented. There are libraries that it tries to import that don’t exist, etc. The funny thing about vibe coding when it comes to the software development process is that mistakes are caught almost instantly by a compiler and by the runtime. The errors are very, very verbose, where the LLM can pick it up and then fix it right away.”

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:

“It just ranges so much from gaming to trading-related enhancement, agentic trading, etc.”

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

“It’s pay as you go. You pay based on your API usage, so it’s not about paying a monthly fee.”

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

“Injective has a MultiVM environment, so this means there’s an additional web assembly environment which actually utilizes Rust, which is a very, very safe language and prevents a lot of vibe coding solutions from writing unsafe code.”

More importantly:

“There are these built-in financial modules, chain-level components like the exchange module that are completely safe, and there’s no way for misconfigured applications to interact with it in an unsafe way.”

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.

“The EVM opens up to the millions of developers and potentially billions of users, virtual machine environments for smart contracts, performance, exchange, and financial layers at the backbone.”

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.