What is a vibe coder?

You're a vibe coder if you (a) ship real software, (b) direct an AI to do most of the writing, and (c) can read what it produced well enough to steer. You're not a vibe coder if you're only using ChatGPT to copy snippets into a tutorial you don't understand that's learning, which is great, but it's not the practice.

Most vibe coders came from one of four backgrounds: founders who used to hire freelancers, designers who used to hand specs to devs, PMs who used to write PRDs and wait, and career-switchers who tried bootcamps and bounced off. What they share isn't a resume it's the willingness to ship an ugly v1 and talk to users.

Forget the syntax debates. In real cohorts, the skills that separate finishers from abandoners are:

1. Scope discipline. Writing the WON'T list is the whole game.
2. Prompt anatomy. Role → goal → constraints → evidence. See our prompting section.
3. Reading diffs. You don't need to write React, but you need to skim a diff and spot ‘that's not what I asked for'.
4. Backend hygiene. RLS on every table, no secrets in the client. Non-negotiable.
5. Distribution instinct. One SEO page + one warm channel + one launch surface. Enough.
6. User conversation. Five real strangers > any dashboard.

There is no ‘vibe coder salary' most are founders. From our cohort: the median finisher hits $1.2k MRR by month 4, the top decile clears $15k MRR by month 6, and the bottom third never leaves free. The gap isn't talent it's whether they wrote a kill list on Day 3 and whether they talked to five strangers on Day 30. Every high earner in the sample did both.