2024 was the year everyone discovered they could ship software without knowing how to write it. Vibe coding. Cursor. Copilot. Claude doing the heavy lifting while humans provided the vibes.
500,000 apps submitted to Apple's App Store last year. Most in over a decade. Not because we suddenly got better at building software. Because we got better at generating it.
The agents wrote the code (if/else statements lol). The engineers, the ones you had to hire to clean it up, wrote the apology emails.
Garbage in. Garbage out. Circle of life.
Letting if/else statements cosplay as "agents": they don't know what they don't know. And neither do the people prompting them.
Platforms are waking up.
YouTube is pushing back. Apple is drowning in submissions and starting to filter. The distribution channels—the actual gatekeepers—are developing antibodies.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2026/03/21/apple-blocks-vibe-coding-tools-from-store/
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/18/apple-blocks-updates-for-vibe-coding-apps/
https://medium.com/data-science-in-your-pocket/dont-be-a-vibe-coder-30fa7c525971
https://cybernews.com/security/vibe-coding-ai-developers-backlash/
This is a bad look for Cloudflare. Allowing 1 developer to vibe-code a framework in a week and then release it to customers with security vulnerabilities. You can't do that when you are a trusted cybersecurity company. https://t.co/T1GSoQWQGz pic.twitter.com/3cTRvEMA9C
— Ryan • Web AI (@DontFearAI) February 26, 2026
This is what happens when slop hits scale. The platforms don't care about your AI-generated masterpiece. They care about signal-to-noise ratio. And right now? All noise.
The job obs didn't disappear. They got worse.
We used to hire engineers to build things. Now we hire them to:
- Figure out what the AI actually built
- Explain to stakeholders why it doesn't work
- Rewrite it properly while pretending the first version was "a good start"
- Write the apology emails
That's not automation. That's outsourcing accountability to something that can't feel shame.
1000 agents to do the job of 1 engineer. 1000 engineers to clean up the mess. The math doesn't math.
The 2026 Forecast
The vibe coders are about to meet the vibe checkers. And the vibe checkers have commit access.
2026 Theme Song declared by me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWXxogt9VM
❤️
Jake