Vibe Coders are the New Citizen Developers and they are Reshaping Enterprise and Consumer Tech Products
How Vibe Coders Are Replacing Traditional Software Teams
In conference rooms, hacker houses, and virtual workspaces across industries, a new archetype has emerged: the citizen developer vibe coder.
These individuals who are often without formal programming education are leveraging low-code and no-code platforms to build applications that would have required specialized development teams just five years ago. What began as a fringe movement has evolved into a legitimate transformation of how enterprise and consumer software gets created. It started with citizen development and has morphed into a different, yet somewhat related persona, vibe coding.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020. This represents a fundamental redistribution of technological capability within organizations.
But it doesn't stop there. Here's what some of the leading tech CEOs had to say about how much code is being written by AI agents today:
How Citizen Developers Differ from Vibe Coders in the AI-Built Software Era
While citizen developers have traditionally emerged from non-technical departments like HR, marketing, and operations, the rise of vibe coders—AI-accelerated solo builders and generalists—marks a parallel, and often more technical, frontier in how modern software gets built. While there is tremendous overlap and the lines between the two are blurring, it's important to distinguish the differences that still exist (for now).
Who are vibe coders and how do they differentiate from citizen developers?
The term vibe coder refers to developers (or technically fluent creatives) who lean heavily on natural language coding tools, code copilots, and low-friction developer environments to ideate, prototype, and ship applications with unprecedented speed. Platforms like Cursor, Replit, Codeium, and GPT-4o with Python sandboxing have become their playgrounds.
These builders often operate outside traditional enterprise structures, launching indie tools, MVPs, and side projects, yet they’re reshaping expectations for how much one person can ship. In short, citizen developers build inside companies to solve business needs; vibe coders often build outside companies to create new products.
Why the distinction between vibe coders and citizen developers matter
While citizen developers expand what business professionals can do inside organizations, vibe coders are expanding what individuals can launch without organizations. This divergence highlights a broader decentralization of technical power.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna has noted that citizen developers inside large enterprises are building “mission-critical systems” that rival those created by full engineering teams—especially when paired with AI integrations.
Both groups are reshaping software development in their own image:
Citizen developers are scaling institutional agility.
Vibe coders are scaling individual agency.
The inevitable convergence of vibe coding and citizen development
Interestingly, the two models are beginning to converge. Some vibe coders use enterprise no-code tools for back-office automation, while advanced citizen developers are learning AI-assisted scripting via tools like OpenAI’s Code Interpreter or GitHub Copilot. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, fusion teams will account for more than 75% of digital product development.
The implication is clear: The real power lies not in one model overtaking the other, but in how organizations and ecosystems enable collaboration between structured citizen developer programs and freeform AI-native builders.
The Evolution of Citizen Developers in the Age of Code-Generating AI
Citizen development is no longer confined to automating spreadsheets or creating simple approval flows. What began as stopgap solutions for overburdened IT departments has evolved into a powerful shift in how organizations build, who they hire (or don't hire or even fire) and who gets to do the building
Today, solo builders are architecting entire AI-powered customer journey platforms. Finance professionals are designing dashboard ecosystems that once demanded full-stack engineers. HR leaders are deploying full-scale employee portals without writing a single line of traditional code.
This transformation has been accelerated not just by the rise of low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform(which saw 97% year-over-year user growth in 2022) or Salesforce Lightning, but more recently by the growing adoption of AI-native code editors that interpret natural language inputs into production-ready code.
Tools like Cursor, a code editor powered by large language models, are making professional-grade development accessible to non-engineers. The tool reportedly reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by early 2025, is used at scale inside companies like Amazon, and has been dubbed the next evolution of the "vibe-coder" movement—where users build serious software using conversational prompts. In fact, a solo vibe-coding entrepreneur just sold his company that was only operating for six months for $80M.
“We’re seeing solutions created by citizen developers that we wouldn’t have thought possible without traditional development teams,” says Charles Lamanna, Corporate VP of Business Applications at Microsoft. “The sophistication gap between professional and citizen-developed applications is narrowing.”
What challenges do citizen developers and vibe coders have?
As the barriers to software creation fall, a new set of constraints emerges: cultural, infrastructural, and regulatory. Both citizen developers and vibe coders now face the friction of systems never designed for distributed, AI-powered software creation.
How the emergence of citizen development strain traditional corporate models
Inside organizations, citizen developers are forcing a redefinition of what IT governance even means primarily. Previously, software deployment followed a clear path: business request → IT evaluation → dev team execution→ compliance. Now, with non-technical employees building mission-critical apps using tools like Power Apps, Retool, or Glide, that linear model breaks down.
Enterprises are responding with “citizen development frameworks”—structured programs that blend autonomy with compliance. Companies like Quickbase and Unqork have gained traction by offering low-code platforms with built-in permissioning, version control, and audit logs. But scaling these models across global teams with varying skill levels and data access remains an unsolved problem.
“The challenge isn’t technical anymore—it’s cultural and structural,” explains Deb Gildersleeve, CIO at Quickbase. “Organizations need to reimagine governance models when potentially thousands of employees can build applications.”
The real bottleneck isn’t a lack of enthusiasm but a necessity of earning trust. CIOs must balance speed with security, autonomy with accountability.
Vibe Coders Run Into Platform Fragility, Security, and Scaling Constraint Challenges
Outside corporate firewalls, vibe coders face a different but equally limiting constraint: infrastructure that wasn’t built for solo generalists moving at AI speed.
While platforms like Cursor, Replit, and Codeium provide the scaffolding to build fast, issues arise around:
Code maintainability (AI-generated code often lacks consistent documentation)
Team handoff (many projects start solo but must be scaled by teams)
Security gaps (vibe coders rarely implement enterprise-grade practices early)
Compute and cost scaling (serverless is fast, but it’s not always cheap or scalable)
Vibe coders also lack the built-in governance layers found in enterprise no-code environments. The result? Projects can break under their own success—growing faster than the infrastructure supporting them.
“Vibe coding is powerful, but the real unlock will come when cloud infra becomes as composable as the code being generated,” noted Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, in a recent interview.
Bridging the Divide: A Shared Responsibility
Both citizen developers and vibe coders represent opposite poles of the same shift: software creation is no longer reserved for full-stack developers. But their success now hinges on infrastructure innovation that includes the models that support security, collaboration, versioning, and AI integration at scale.
Whether inside the enterprise or operating solo, the new generation of builders is calling for platforms and practices that assume:
Speed is non-negotiable
AI is always in the loop
Collaboration happens across roles and systems, not just within teams
Governance is proactive, not reactive
This inflection point will determine who builds the next wave of tools and how they can have them endure beyond their first demo.
Why Citizen Development and Vibe Coding are Reshaping the Competitive Advantage in Enterprise and Consumer Tech
It's become more than apparent that the traditional boundaries of who builds software and who builds it are collapsing. The rise of citizen developers and vibe coders is not only transforming enterprise technology, but also reshaping the pace of innovation in consumer applications, internal tooling, and digital products at large.
In both corporate and creator/entrepreneurial ecosystems, the ability to prototype, ship, and iterate without needing deep technical expertise is becoming a major competitive advantage in itself.
In the enterprise world, the shift is dramatic. Organizations that once relied on central, human-first IT and engineering teams are now empowering business units, operations leads, even marketing managers to build their own tools. These "non-traditional builders" are using powers like Retool, Airtable, Power Platform and Glibde to launch internal products tailored to specific operational needs. They are also adopting GenAI tools like Cursor, Replit, Loveable and others to do the same. This drastically reduces development time from months to days.
In parallel, vibe coders are delivering lightweight consumer focused apps, browser extensions, and micro-SaaS experiments with astonishing speed. This agility enables them to respond to viral moments, new platform features, or niche user pain points fasters than traditional product teams. TO add, the build in public movement is giving them organic channels to document their journeys and build an immediate network to quickly sell-in to.
How Citizen Developers in the Phase of Build-Your-Own Productism
The result is a fundamental redistribution of who holds creative and technical power in organziations. For vendors and startups alike, this means the customer may go from using your software to replacing it.
More than ever, product defensibility now depends on modularity, (citizen)developer-friendliness, and API-first or MCP-first architecture. If your solution isn't easily extendable and composable by different levels of builders, it may be sidelined in favour of something homegrown and more contextually relevant.
This Is especially true for vertical SaaS platforms. Instead of competing with peers, many now find themselves competing against their users who are taking the best of the features and functionality they like from various tools in their stack, and assembling bespoke solutions via low-code platforms or scripting their own automation flows and apps with vibe coding tools. As Garner notes, by 2026, 80% of software development will occur outside traditional software teams, powered by citizen developers (and GenAI ) builders.
The Moat for Emerging Software Tools is in Enablement and Ownership
Now, everyone is technically (the irony here) a builder. The advantage no longer goes to the company with the most engineers, but it goes to the company that enables the most builders. This is where true network effects arise.
Platforms like Stripe, Shopify, OpenAI, and Figma have thrived because of what others built on top of them. The same logic now applies to low-code, no-code, and vibe coding ecosystems.
The modern software stack is no longer a fortress—it’s a set of Legos. Whoever offers the most flexible, interoperable, and generative pieces wins.
As enterprise and consumer boundaries blur, the rise of these new builders represents a broader paradigm shift: one where product velocity, experimentation, and collaboration will determine the next wave of software winners. This is far from the moat that headcount and capital used to create.
Will AI replace all technical talent with vibe coders and citizen developers?
The most innovative organizations aren’t choosing between technical and non-technical talent, they’re activating both. They’re building fusion teams where product designers, operations specialists, and vibe coders and AI agents are co-creating digital experiences. We even see this in how teams are hiring talent and the new emerging roles that are being seeked out:
These hybrid teams combine rapid experimentation with production-grade execution. A Forrester study found that companies adopting this model shipped software 3–5 times faster than peers using traditional SDLC models—while achieving significantly higher alignment with frontline needs. In consumer tech, we’re seeing this play out through apps like Coda, Notion, Cursor, Zapier, and Tana, where creators are building “microproducts” using modular logic, AI agents, and web integrations—effectively bypassing the need for venture-funded platforms to serve their communities.
The Future of Building Cool Sh*t Belongs to Everyone
The emergence of citizen developers and vibe coders signals a profound shift and redefinition of how digital products are imagined, created, and delivered across every layer of society. The irony is that every product, literally everything, and as a byproduct every company needs some form of digital enablement. This means that the future of Building Cool Sh*t belongs to everyone.
What Champath Palihapitiya coined as the software industrial complex, is no more.
No longer confined to engineering departments or VC-funded startups, product creation—and just building cool sh*t in general— becoming a universal skillset, distributed across teams, industries, and even individual creators.
Low-code platforms give frontline employees the ability to build operational systems that once required entire dev teams. Simultaneously, vibe coders are launching real-time consumer tools from their laptops using natural language and AI-enhanced environments like Cursor and Codeium.
Together, these movements are blurring the lines between maker and user, collapsing the distance between an idea and a live product. The underlying tech stack—once rigid and centralized and requiring headcount and capital—is evolving into a composable, modular ecosystem built on APIs, reusable logic, and AI agents that co-create alongside humans.
For organizations, the imperative is clear: success will depend not on how many engineers they employ, but on how well they empower builders across every function. This means rethinking governance, designing for interoperability, and investing in platforms that unlock creativity at the edges.
For individuals, the opportunity is just as profound. Whether you're a marketer automating workflows or a solo founder building an AI-native product, the barrier to impact has never been lower.
We’re entering a future where software (and as a byproduct everything we need to live, work, play and prosper) is something we all shape.
The playbook for innovation is being rewritten in real time. And its authors are anyone with the insight, curiosity, and tools to build what the world needs next.