Somebody added “vibe coder” to their LinkedIn headline and now there are forty thousand of them.
What happened
A few months ago “vibe coding” meant asking an AI to build something while you sat there nodding. Fair enough. Useful, even. Cursor and Copilot made it genuinely possible to ship things without knowing what a for-loop does.
Then LinkedIn got hold of it.
Now there are people listing “vibe coding” as a skill next to Microsoft Excel. Recruiters are posting about it. Someone made a course. The course costs $297.
The actual tool underneath all this
Here’s the thing nobody on LinkedIn will say because it would ruin the mystique — Cursor is just VS Code with an AI bolted on. You open it, you type what you want in plain English, it writes the code. Sometimes correctly. It costs $20/month on the pro plan or nothing on free.
That’s it. That’s vibe coding.
It’s good. Genuinely. I built a working Chrome extension in an afternoon with zero extension experience. But calling yourself a “vibe coder” for using it is like calling yourself a chef because you own a microwave.
The LinkedIn part
My favorite genre is the post that goes “I used to be a marketer. Then I discovered vibe coding. Now I build full-stack apps in my sleep.” And the app is a to-do list. It is always a to-do list.
Someone will put “vibe coding instructor” in their headline by the end of the month. I can feel it coming. Like weather.
Anyway, Cursor is $20/month and the free tier is genuinely fine for small projects. Skip the $297 course. The tool has a built-in tutorial that takes eleven minutes.