In less than a year, AI-assisted coding has become a fixation within Silicon Valley, which sees the companies building such products as some of the most lucrative startups in tech. While tools like Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code can't transform techno novices into app-building wizards overnight, they do make coding faster—and easier for people who have some knowledge of coding but don't have the same skill as a veteran engineer.

Fooling around with the tools has become a popular hobby, a marker of a person's seriousness in exploring the rapidly evolving world of AI. And no group loves to catch a trend quite like venture capitalists, with many investors lately displaying the same faddish fervor for vibing code that they previously channeled into long-distance running and quantifying the quality of their sleep.

Some have used their journey of vibe coded self-discovery to make things for work, automating market research and scraping up startup news from the web. Plenty of others have put their newfound leisure activity to less mundane uses.