Welcome to The AI Shift by Inc42, our all-new newsletter that delves deep into the world of artificial intelligence, LLMs, big tech giants and the major trends sweeping the Indian startup and tech ecosystem. Here’s the sixth edition; do send us your feedback and suggestions so we can improve as we go along!

Just over a year ago, OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” to talk about using AI to do “dumb” and menial coding tasks. What started as a riff on AI-powered lazy software development has now turned into a serious professional reality.

Nowadays, thanks to memes and serious startups in this space, pretty much everyone knows vibe coding means building software by telling a chatbot your intent.

Instead of writing every line of code, a user can describe the vibe, the look, the feel, and the function. The AI then does the heavy lifting of writing code.

Across startups and enterprises, intent-first, AI-assisted building is reshaping how software gets shipped, who gets to build it, and how accountability is distributed. Teams are moving faster than before, and capabilities are spreading beyond engineering.

This does not mean that AI-assisted software development is spelling doom for developers. It is rather redefining their jobs. Being a coder today is less about being a syntax wizard and more about having high-quality logic and clarity of vision.

However, this comes with its own set of questions. When an AI interprets a “vibe” into millions of lines of code, who is responsible for the bugs and who owns the security?

Software Enters A New Era

Vibe coding represents a tectonic shift in software development, moving away from code-as-instruction to code-as-outcome.

Instead of painstakingly writing every line of syntax, developers now simply describe behaviours, flows, and intent to the chatbot. The AI then generates the skeleton and general structure, and the human simply decides if the result is acceptable.

This shift is most visible in design-led and early stage product work. Rahul Jain, founder of custom software developer Pixeldust, notes that AI has compressed delivery cycles.

Explaining this, he underlines that software development previously involved many hiccups and stakeholders – designers mapped journeys, engineers translated flows, and prototypes took days to stitch together. Today, Jain said, much of that scaffolding is automated.

“The base is ready… With extra time on their hands, teams now focus more on high-value finishing touches like building animations and creating a nuanced design language.”

However, the founder of AI coding startup Workers IO, Chaitanya Choudhary, warns that agentic coding, while helping across development, fails at architecture. He feels that vibe coding still needs human judgment, clear constraints, and multiple rounds of planning before implementing key decisions.

But even as the industry weighs these architectural gaps, the barriers to entry are slowly crumbling.

Capability Is Spreading Faster Than Governance

The most consequential effect of vibe coding is not developer productivity but access. Internal tools that earlier were considered too small or low-priority to spend engineering time on are now being created by people who aren’t engineers.

“Individual contributors are shipping code at lightning speed. It’s easier than ever for one person to ship more........

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