Vibe coding news: what’s happening and what it means for your business

Just over a year ago, “vibe coding” sounded like a meditation technique you’d do at a music festival, not a way to build software.

In 2026, it’s a dictionary-recognized word, a multibillion-dollar market, and how a lot of people are building everything from online stores to hardware prototypes.

What started as a niche way to build software with AI prompts instead of writing code now directly affects what you can build, how much it costs, and what to watch out for.

There’s a lot going on, and I spoke with Dainius Kavoliūnas, Head of Product at Hostinger Horizons, to make sense of it all.

Vibe coding has gone mainstream

Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its 2025 Word of the Year. The numbers back it up.

According to our latest vibe coding statistics, 63% of people using vibe coding tools aren’t developers. They’re business owners, freelancers, designers, and people who’ve never written a line of code professionally. 

What’s making it possible is a growing wave of vibe coding tools built for exactly this kind of user. Platforms like Cursor, Lovable, and Hostinger Horizons are all competing to make building with AI as easy as explaining what you want to a freelancer, except this one doesn’t ghost you.

Dainius is seeing it firsthand:

“The profile of who’s building on Hostinger Horizons is so diverse. We’re seeing hairdressers, fitness coaches, local shop owners. People who would never have considered building a web app before.

They don’t need to know anything about code. They’re thinking about their business problem and describing it in their own words.”

So if you’ve been sitting on a business idea because you can’t code, now’s the time to get building.

People are launching real businesses with it

What are all these non-developers actually creating? Turns out, a lot of them are building things that matter.

A creative director used Hostinger Horizons to launch a community-driven disaster response platform. Another user is drafting ready-made website prototypes for small businesses and selling them on Instagram.

Nearly 70% of Hostinger Horizons users are building businesses or ecommerce stores, which meant Dainius and the team had to move fast to keep up with demand. 

“One thing that surprised us was how many users immediately started looking for ways to accept payments. People are building real businesses. And the range is wild.

We’ve seen a Caribbean restaurant in London, a dog walking field booking system, a baby teething solutions store, someone selling fragrance vending machines. An online running coach. A roofing company. None of these people waited for a developer. They just built what they needed.”

People are also building custom tools to solve their own problems

Not everything people vibe code is meant to be a product. Increasingly, people are using these tools to build things just for themselves.

Nature published a feature about scientists using vibe coding to create their own research tools. Climate researcher Zeke Hausfather used AI to build novel temperature visualizations he couldn’t have coded himself, including a “thermal helix” animation showing global warming spiralling upwards through time.

A molecular biologist at Argonne National Laboratory with no coding experience used AI tools as a substitute for a grad student, getting them to run data through software packages, cross-check results, and produce graphs.

Dainius says the same thing is happening inside Hostinger:

“Teams have built internal dashboards, workflow trackers, and quick calculators to solve specific operational problems. Things that would’ve sat in a queue waiting for engineering time now get built in an afternoon by the people who actually need them.

You don’t need to launch a product. You just need to solve the annoying problem that’s eating two hours of your week.”

That mindset applies whether you’re a 900-person tech company or a freelancer working from your kitchen table.

An appointment scheduler that handles your bookings, a financial dashboard that tracks your cash flow, an invoice generator that saves you an hour every week. These are all vibe coding ideas you cancreate yourself without hiring anyone.

Security is something you need to think seriously about

In early 2026, a social networking platform called Moltbook made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Built entirely with vibe coding, its founder publicly stated he didn’t write a single line of code. The problem? Nobody reviewed it either.

Security researchers at Wiz discovered that Moltbook’s database had been left wide open, exposing 1.5 million authentication tokens and 35,000 email addresses. The cause was a misconfigured database that went live without anyone checking it. It’s not an isolated case.

Georgia Tech launched the Vibe Security Radar after realizing nobody was tracking vulnerabilities introduced by AI coding tools. After scanning over 43,000 security advisories, they’ve confirmed 74 cases so far, with 14 rated critical and 25 high. March 2026 alone had 35 new vulnerabilities, more than all of 2025 combined.

And a Stanford study warned as early as 2023 that developers using AI tools actually wrote less secure code than those who didn’t, while feeling more confident about its security. The data since then suggests that the warning was spot on.

None of this means you shouldn’t use vibe coding. But if your project handles customer data, the platform you’re building on matters. This is something Hostinger thought about early on with Horizons:

“Security was a design decision from the start, not something we bolted on after.

Users on Horizons don’t manage their own databases or server configurations. We handle that, which limits the kind of misconfiguration that caused the Moltbook breach. 

Most of our users are business owners, not engineers, so we build the safeguards into the platform itself rather than expecting them to handle it on their own.”

Vibe coding is expanding beyond software

In May 2026, Lovable backed a Danish hardware startup called Atech in an $800,000 pre-seed round alongside a16z’s scout fund and Sequoia Scout Fund. Atech’s pitch: bring vibe coding to physical hardware.

Users buy a starter hardware kit, describe what they want to build to an AI chatbot, and get working code for a physical prototype. According to Atech, their users already range from four-year-olds building toy cars to engineers at a hydrogen synthesis plant who need precise voltage sensing.

It’s early days, but the direction is worth paying attention to. Describing what you want and having AI build it is spreading well beyond websites and apps.

If the same approach that lets someone launch an online store can also produce a working hardware prototype, it suggests that the way we interact with AI tools right now is just the beginning.

That means getting comfortable with these tools now puts you ahead of a curve that’s only going to accelerate.

As Dainius puts it:

“What’s happening with hardware is a sign of where this is all going. A year ago, most people hadn’t heard of vibe coding. Now you’ve got people building disaster response platforms and four-year-olds building toy cars. And they’re just describing what they want.

It makes me think about what our users will be building in two or three years that we haven’t even considered yet. But whatever it is, the skill is the same: learning to communicate your ideas clearly to AI tools. That’s going to carry over to whatever comes next.”

What to take away from all this

The pace of change is real, but the opportunity is pretty simple. Vibe coding lets you build things that used to require either technical skills or a budget you didn’t have.

It’s part of a broader shift in software development trends, and it’s moving fast. That’s true whether you’re launching an online store, automating a tedious part of your workflow, or finally acting on an idea that’s been sitting in your head for months.

The people getting the most out of it right now are the ones who picked a real problem, described it clearly, and shipped something.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to start, the tools are ready, and Hostinger’s vibe coding platform is a good place to see what you can build.