Club Benefits
The AI Age has begun, and our digital assistants are ready and waiting to take on translation, transcription, complex calculations and many other processes. What used to take hours can now be achieved with the right prompts and tools in just minutes.
The same can be said of software development. Whether building apps to share with the world or just building tools to solve issues you’re facing in your daily workflows, “vibe coding” is here to stay and has democratized the development process for all.
Ten years ago, building software required years of programming knowledge. Now, you can describe an app in plain English, and AI can generate large portions of it for you. When you need to refine or debug, the AI will do that for you too. Microsoft's Copilot lays claim to be a particularly useful co-developer basically since it’s baked into just about every facet of Windows by now.
What 'vibe coding' actually means
Vibe coding is all about making sure you’re feeling comfortable while building. To that end, it relies on natural language input to build code that would otherwise have taken years to learn, like asking for a certain UI element to be resized, or suggesting color changes.
It’s less about digging through code, and more about explaining what you want: Intent over syntax. Copilot is already doing much of the lifting for the development community, too.
GitHub Copilot helps suggest how to finish lines of code while you’re in the zone, while you iterate using words instead of numbers and brackets. Agentic AI can run in the background while you’re working on Task A, getting Tasks B to Z done down to your specifications.
It’s not just apps, either. Ask Copilot to put together a spreadsheet that tracks your workouts, or a website for your personal blog, and it’ll do just that while following guardrails you put in place.
Why Copilot?
Microsoft is in a unique spot when it comes to AI integration, because it’s running it across the Windows OS that millions of people use daily. Oh, and it also owns GitHub, Azure servers, enterprise apps, and much more.
There’s an argument to be made that Microsoft is very close to creating the ultimate “vibe coding ecosystem” where Copilot writes code, Windows tests it, Azure deploys it, and GitHub distributes it. It could mean that having access to Microsoft’s Copilot AI can turn you from a solo bedroom dev into an app entrepreneur who’s able to share projects across the globe.
An app factory in your home? That’s the dream.
Following a precedent
OK, we’re not quite there yet, but it feels like Copilot is on the cusp of delivering something that we’ve not seen since, well, ever.
That kind of code-to-user pipeline is unheard of right now, but there are other examples of how AI and web tools have smoothed out challenging computing and design concepts.
It’s not all that long ago that you’d need pro-level software like Photoshop to make an awesome design, but now Canva can build what you’re looking for in minutes.
It used to take hours of research to compare products you were trying to decide between, but AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT and our own Tom's Guide Product Finder can now pull up every minor detail with ease.
Microsoft now stands on the verge of doing something similar for every aspiring developer, letting you build something for your phone, your PC, or someone else’s screen and provide support after release, too.
What about the risks?
That’s not to say there’s not due diligence needed when building an app through an AI tool. Bugs will need to be ironed out, and security best practices will be imperative.
After all, if you build an app in 5 minutes but it requires a month of fixes afterward, is the process really as smooth as you need it to be?
From another perspective, however, it means development teams will still be needed, and with the power of GitHub and Azure, you could even build an app by day and help others fix theirs by night.
Looking out for the little guy
If you’re a teacher building a bespoke app for a single lesson, you can put together a small piece of interactive software in minutes, built to your exact specifications. New parents can automate bedtime, feeding, and chore schedules, while aspiring artists can build a professional website to showcase their work.
Small businesses can avoid expensive accounting tools and keep everything in-house, using Copilot to jot down Excel formulas they could only have dreamt of.
The potential applications are colossal, and it could end up feeling like a second coming of Windows 11. Forget Windows 12, you could be telling your PC what applications you need to get through the day more quickly and watching them build in real time.
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