Vibe Coding

Su Niannian stared at the user growth curve on the screen, absently twirling a pen between her fingers.

The curve was still rising, but not fast enough.

BugKiller had been live for four months and had over two hundred paying teams. That was not bad for a startup, but she felt they should have done better given the strength of their product. That was her responsibility as COO.

The real pressure was CodeSafe. It came built into Dingsheng Cloud for free, making BugKiller's pricing extremely awkward. CodeSafe had not only taken Dingsheng Cloud's users, but had also set a psychological price point for users of other cloud platforms.

BugKiller's image had become: useful, but a little expensive. For most teams that did not desperately need it, they would rather choose not to buy it.

This was no longer a technical problem.

It was a matter of user psychology.

Jiang Yixin walked over with her MacBook in her arms, her face practically screaming, "I'm excited."

"Ms. Su, I have an idea about that batch of anomalous users this afternoon. Shall we discuss it in the meeting room?"

"Sure." Su Niannian stood up and picked up her laptop as well.

Once they reached the meeting room, Jiang Yixin set her computer on the table. A CSV file filled the screen: user IDs, submission times, code snippets, error types, all kinds of raw data piled together in a dense mass.

"I ran through it the way you said," Jiang Yixin said, pointing at the screen. "There really is a problem. This batch of users has highly consistent variable naming, indentation styles, and even error patterns. They are completely different from the personal habits of normal programmers. I think their code was generated by AI."

Su Niannian glanced over the table without looking at the specifics, then asked first, "How much data are we talking about?"

"They account for 17% of total active users, but contribute 32% of all submissions."

"Okay." Su Niannian opened Lark. "Next time you give me data, do this first—"

She dragged the CSV into a Lark multidimensional table, selected several columns for a pivot analysis, and the system automatically generated charts. Thirty seconds later, three panels appeared on the screen: a submission frequency trend chart, a pie chart of code feature distribution, and a user behavior time heatmap.

Jiang Yixin froze for a moment.

"Raw data is just raw material," Su Niannian said. "But the human brain cannot process thousands of rows in a spreadsheet. The first step in business intelligence, BI, is turning data into patterns people can understand at a glance. Time distribution, behavior clustering, anomaly labels, visualization—they are not for looking pretty. They let decision-makers grasp the key points at a glance."

She pointed at the heatmap. "Look, this time period is concentrated. It is much more intuitive than flipping through a thousand rows of submission records in a spreadsheet."

Jiang Yixin stared at the screen, her expression shifting from confusion to realization. On her first day, she had learned her first real lesson.

"Now that we have a visualization panel, what comes next?"

Jiang Yixin blinked. "What?"

"When looking at user data, do not just look at what they do. Look at who they are—this is called a user profile."

Su Niannian scrolled to the user registration information and tapped the screen.

"Look at the email domains."

Jiang Yixin leaned closer, her gaze sweeping rapidly over them.

"...Mostly company emails, but not from internet companies. There are consumer goods companies, GG companies, and even... real estate?"

"Now look at the submission time distribution."

Jiang Yixin switched to the time heatmap.

"Concentrated between two and five in the afternoon on workdays? That isn't..."

"Not a programmer's work rhythm," Su Niannian finished. "Normal developers are usually at their best in the morning, with submission peaks from ten to twelve. There is another wave around three or four in the afternoon. This group peaks around one or two at noon, and the duration is short. It looks like they are doing it during lunch breaks."

Jiang Yixin opened the code samples shared by the users.

"Ms. Su, look at this comment: 'After the user clicks the button, display a confirmation dialog. After confirmation, call the backend API to submit the order.'"

Su Niannian took one look.

"That is not a code comment. That is a product requirements document."

"Exactly! And this one: 'Display a loading animation when the page loads, then replace it with a list once the data returns.' No one writing code would write comments like that."

Jiang Yixin spoke faster and faster.

"Look at the error types too: undefined variables, mismatched brackets, misspelled function names. They are all basic syntax problems. Even a bad programmer would not make this many mistakes so densely, unless..."

She stopped and looked up at Su Niannian.

"They are not programmers at all."

Su Niannian said nothing, but quietly praised her in her heart. By the time she had guided her to the third step, Jiang Yixin had connected the dots herself. She was quick.

"Then who are they?" Jiang Yixin asked herself, already digging through the job title fields in the registration information.

Five minutes later, the two of them fell silent as they stared at the pie chart on the screen.

Product managers, 28%; operations, 22%; UI/UX designers, 18%; marketing, 12%; other non-technical roles, 20%.

Not a single one was a programmer.

"They use AI to write code," Jiang Yixin said slowly, "then throw the Bugs AI cannot handle to BugKiller to fix."

Su Niannian stood up and walked to the whiteboard.

"It is not just about fixing Bugs. Think about it—why do these people use AI to write code?"

"Because... they have ideas, but do not know how to program?"

"Right. Product managers want to build prototypes to validate requirements, operations staff want to make campaign pages, and designers want to turn mockups into interactive demos. Before, all of that had to be scheduled and handed to developers. Now, AI lets them do it themselves."

Jiang Yixin picked up where she left off. "But AI-generated code is not always correct, and when it runs into Bugs, they cannot understand them."

"So they use BugKiller."

Su Niannian drew a line on the whiteboard. On the left, she wrote "AI Generation." On the right, she wrote "Bug Fixes." Between them, she drew a stick figure.

"These people are not programmers. They are people using AI to create products. Programming is not their job; it is a means of realizing their ideas. AI has lowered the barrier, but not to zero. That gap in the middle is our opportunity."

She wrote two English words in the middle of the whiteboard.

Vibe Coding.

"Vibe Coding?" Jiang Yixin read aloud.

"Right. You do not need to understand every line of code. You create based on feeling and ideas, AI handles the writing, and when something goes wrong—"

"We cover for them!" Jiang Yixin blurted out. "If they write something wrong, would they not come to us to fix it? This is technical insurance for ordinary people."

Su Niannian turned to look at her.

That was a good metaphor—insurance gave people a sense of security. Users did not need to understand what an undefined variable was. They only needed to know that when something went wrong, someone had their back.

"Exactly. That is our value."

Her phone rang.

Caller ID: Mom.

Su Niannian glanced at the whiteboard, apologized, and stepped outside to answer it.

"Nian Nian, are you free this weekend? Auntie Li introduced a young man. He works at a bank and has quite good prospects. Why not go meet him?"

"No. I'm busy."

"You are busy, busy, busy every day. Busy until when? You are already twenty-seven. If you keep putting it off, all the good ones will be taken, you know?"

Su Niannian switched the phone to her other ear.

"Your father said that if it really does not work out, you can bring back that out-of-town boy from back then for us to meet."

Su Niannian's fingers tightened.

"You were the ones who would not allow it back then."

There was a pause on the other end.

"That was then. Why don't you bring a boyfriend home?"

"An out-of-towner, no house, no local residency—we do not care about any of that anymore," her mother said more quickly. "As long as you are willing to date someone. As long as you are not alone."

"Mom, I'm in a meeting."

After hanging up, Su Niannian drew in a deep breath.

Jiang Yixin kept her head lowered as she flipped through the data, tactfully pretending not to notice.

"Where were we?"

"Technical insurance."

"Right." Su Niannian picked up a marker and drew three arrows beneath Vibe Coding. "This market has three characteristics. First, it has a huge user base. Anyone with an idea is a potential user. Second, willingness to pay is high. What they are buying is not technical service, but time and certainty. Third, it is growing rapidly. The more widespread AI tools become, the larger this group will grow."

She glanced at Jiang Yixin, who was taking notes at lightning speed.

"Come on. Let's go find Mr. Han."