march 11, 2026
vibe coding may become the next drop-shipping for gen z hustlers.
i’ve been very excited about the application of llm’s to consumer use cases. while b2b companies like sierra, cursor, and harvey have seen rapid (and almost unseen-before) revenue and private valuation growth, there are equally if not more exciting consumer-facing examples. chatgpt would be the first and most obvious one. then came character.ai, speak for language learning, and all of the no-code builders (lovable, bolt, replit, base44, emergent, etc).
every big technological shift (web / mobile / location data / etc) ends up producing a bunch of really interesting consumer products (where their functionality is enabled by some net-new tech). oftentimes, the first products that come out following these shifts are obvious, somewhat interesting, and will get adoption due to early adopters eagerly flocking to try new things. the example people often give is for mobile phones - what went viral first was that beer-drinking app (tilt your phone and the beer on the screen moves accordingly), but what mobile phones really enabled, were apps like uber and airbnb.
similarly, with this ai shift, the “first-generation” apps have come out in obvious categories. since llm’s were originally thought of as chatbots, some good use cases will be centered around language, like chatting with virtual characters (character.ai) or language-learning apps (speak).
now, v2 consumer ai apps and opportunities are emerging. a bunch of them are enabled by this ai coding wave. there are of course some differences, but turns out code is a bit like a language, which is great. not only can you build a co-pilot to make engineers more efficient (the b2b use case), but you can turn natural language into code (enables the consumer use case). that allows for people to create products, like websites and web / mobile apps, that they couldn’t before.
but llm’s can go beyond creating products, why stop there? the new wave that people seem excited about right now is ai that can create and run all aspects of a businesses for you. this involves building products / websites, running an autonomous marketing engine (like ai ads generation / optimization), and running other operational aspects of a business.
this is interesting because originally, ai that creates products sounded like a good idea in itself. and it certainly is - lovable went from $300m → $400m run rate in the last month alone. but the idea becomes bigger when you add in ai-enabled marketing and bizops. many people have created interesting things with code-gen tools, for example i’m sure some small businesses have revamped their website and are already seeing increased traffic / revenue. but then you need to distribute what you’ve built, which a lot of people aren’t good at. this fixes that.
already, young hustlers have discovered vibe coding and taken full advantage of it. kids used to create small service businesses (mowing lawns), then with the internet discovered e-commerce businesses (drop-shipping), and now many have shifted towards creating vibe-coded apps. if you’re good at marketing, this is a great hack. there are countless examples of vibe-coded apps that people bootstrap to solid success (no need to raise venture funding if that’s not your goal).
taste in ideas still matters - being able to find a real pain point that someone would pay to fix, will only become increasingly important. if ai product-generation is solved (early signs of success), and ai-marketing gets solved (people are working on this now), being able to pick the right products to build is what remains. also, design may become more important. many of these ai app-builders output generic slop products that use the same font and look the same and feel crappy to use - adding tasteful ui tweaks goes a really long way.
there are so many cool apps i’m seeing people vibe code, that i’m excited about this “vibe coding as a hustle” trend:
- i saw one person build a powder day travel booker - it monitors weather forecasts across the country for 10” of snow or more, then checks flights / hotels (without you having to open 50 tbs to do this manually) and alerts you when there is a trip to a big powder day location in your price range. so cool
- another one that went viral (10k+ likes on twitter) was a product that shows you which patios / bars in manhattan are getting sunlight on a given friday / saturday evening, so you could go soak up the sun there
i’d pay a few bucks a month for each of these, and judging from the virality / replies, it seems many others would too.
people talk about ai enabling “personal software” (where each person can spin up their own apps to solve their own use cases), but i think it’s even cooler that people can now share these with others. there are so many creative people in the world that were previously bottlenecked by coding, that can now release their apps in the wild for others to enjoy.