How we build is changing. Why we build is not.
“Learn to code.”
For years, those three words served as a shorthand for surviving an economy rife with creative destruction and the job market disruptions that went with it. Software engineering, we were told, was here to stay— an island of stability in a sea of change.
Then came the age of AI. It turns out that large language models (LLMs) have a talent not only for writing blogs and articles, but code as well. This has left many programmers facing what feels like an existential crisis—where do they go from here, and what does it mean to build software when you’re not the one writing the code?
Enter “vibe coding.”
A new way of thinking about what it means to build software
What exactly is “vibe coding”? While specific definitions vary, it generally refers to a dev process in which a human works alongside a low- or no-code AI partner to build software. In theory, leveraging AI to do the manual writing of code should free up humans to focus more on the creative work that goes into software development. They can continuously refine their vision for what the software should be using prompts to the AI.
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What this means for the future of software engineering as a profession is unclear. Some are skeptical of vibe coding becoming dominant. Others contend that it’s a paradigm shift for the field. Still others land somewhere in between: Humans who code manually will carve out a “craft code” niche, but most of what’s out there will soon be “vibeware.”
One thing, however, is clear: While the mechanism of software development may be changing, the fundamentals of what makes for good software are not. If anything, they matter even more.
No matter how it’s written, software has to be manically focused on the user
Well before the advent of vibe coding, the software companies faced a problem: The software they were creating was not providing the value they thought it was. Way back in 2019, Pendo found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Features go unused because they’re not aligned with what users want and need.
With AI assistants set to make software easier and faster to build than ever, this problem will get much worse. How can we avoid a world where software abounds, but none of it delivers on its promises?
Software built on a foundation of user data—both quantitative and qualitative—becomes products that users love. Pendo’s software experience management platform exists to help you set that foundation—and build on it.
Unleashing the power of the Pendo platform to understand your users
It all starts with understanding user behavior and sentiment. Pendo Analytics gives you a full view into how users behave in your software today—so you can build even better experiences for them tomorrow. With insights about everything from feature adoption to friction points, developers can work with their colleagues in product and product ops to make sure what they’re creating aligns with what users want.
Dev teams can then work cross-functionally to combine that behavioral data with qualitative feedback from users. Whether it’s in-app polls and surveys about the user experience, or requests on what to build next, Pendo Listen gives teams AI-generated insights from the full spectrum of user feedback about what’s working, what isn’t, and how to structure and validate their software roadmap. The result? A final product that delivers for the user—and the business.
How to stand out in a software landscape transformed
“The hottest new programming language is English,” explained Andrej Karpathy, the AI expert who coined the term “vibe coding.” He meant that programming quality will increasingly be determined by the prompts developers feed agentic AIs. But with this great new power comes great responsibility. The pace of software development is set to increase exponentially, and traditional barriers to it are set to fall. If they want to win in the market, companies need to build their products with a maniacal focus on the user from start to finish—and Pendo’s mission is to help them do just that.
Want to learn more about how Pendo helps you build better software, faster? Get a demo today.
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