The landscape has changed. You now have four viable ways to build systems: traditional code, lowcode, nocode, and vibe coding.
If you're not familiar with the term, "vibe coding" comes from Andrej Karpathy. The idea is simple: describe what you want in natural language, and let AI write the code. Tools like Claude, Cursor, and v0 have made this practical.
Here's what most people get wrong: they treat these as competing approaches. Pick one, commit to it. But real systems don't work that way. Most production systems are hybrids. The skill isn't choosing a paradigm—it's knowing which paradigm to use for which piece.
The Four Paradigms
Traditional Coding — Writing code manually in languages like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Full control, full responsibility. Best for performance-critical systems, custom logic, and situations where you need to own every line.
Lowcode — Visual builders with code escape hatches. Platforms like Retool or OutSystems. You drag and drop most of it, then write code where the visual tools fall short. Best for internal tools, dashboards, and teams with some technical ability.
Nocode — Pure drag-and-drop, no code required. Bubble, Softr, Monday.com. Best for MVPs, simple workflows, and non-technical teams who need to build and maintain their own tools.
Vibe Coding — AI writes code from natural language prompts. You describe what you want, the AI generates it, you iterate. Best for rapid prototyping and full applications—when you understand what you're building and can verify the output.
Real Example: A Micro-SaaS Stack
Say you're building a simple product: an app that takes a photo of a child and uses AI to generate what they might look like as an adult. Sounds straightforward. Here's how it actually breaks down:
Frontend and core app → Vibe coding. Claude or Cursor builds the UI, handles the user flow, writes the application logic. Fast iteration, working code in hours instead of days.
AI image processing → API integration. You're not building the image model yourself. That's millions in compute and research. You call OpenAI, Replicate, or another provider via API.
Payments → API integration. Stripe. Don't reinvent payment processing.
Customer support and project management → Lowcode. Monday.com with Make.com integrations. Your ops team can manage it without touching code.
Performance optimization → Traditional coding. When you hit scale, you'll need human expertise to optimize bottlenecks. The AI got you here, but a senior engineer tightens the expensive parts.
No single paradigm built this. The skill is assembling the right pieces.
How to Choose
Use traditional coding when:
- Performance is critical and every millisecond matters
- You need behavior that doesn't exist in any platform
- Security or compliance requires full control over the codebase
- A technical team will maintain it long-term
Use lowcode when:
- You need speed but also flexibility to customize
- Building internal tools, admin panels, or dashboards
- Your team has some technical ability but not dedicated engineers
- You might outgrow nocode but don't need full custom yet
Use nocode when:
- Speed to market matters most
- The use case is well-defined and common (CRM, project management, landing pages)
- A non-technical team will maintain it
- You're validating an idea before investing in custom development
Use vibe coding when:
- You understand the technical requirements, even if you're not writing every line
- You need custom functionality fast
- You can verify the AI's output
- You're comfortable iterating and correcting course
The Hidden Requirement: Technical Expertise Still Matters
This is the part nobody wants to hear.
Vibe coding is powerful. It's also not magic. The AI makes mistakes. It hallucinates. It builds things that look right but break under real usage.
Experts can detect when the AI is spinning its wheels. They correct course. They guide the model toward better solutions. They verify output against known patterns.
Novices accept broken code. They build systems that don't work correctly. They miss security vulnerabilities because they don't know what to look for.
The mitigation is simple in theory, hard in practice: well-defined tests with clear inputs and outputs. If you can't test it, you can't trust it. This is true for human-written code too, but AI-generated code makes it more urgent.
The interface is still technical. Terminal-based. IDE-based. That's because that's how real developers work. This will change eventually, but not yet. Right now, vibe coding gives the biggest advantage to people who already know how to code.
My Journey: From Code to Lowcode to Vibe Coding
I shifted paradigms in 2020. After years of traditional coding, I moved to lowcode and nocode.
I was genuinely amazed. I built a CRM on Monday.com that had 90% of the functionality of Salesforce Enterprise. Integrated it with PandaDoc, Stripe, and half a dozen other systems using Make.com. The whole thing took a fraction of the time it would have taken to build from scratch.
For many use cases, lowcode and nocode are still the right answer. If you need project management or a CRM, building from scratch with vibe coding will still take longer than configuring Monday.com. Sometimes a simple integration using Make.com accomplishes the same thing faster.
But I've watched the limits emerge. One client started on Monday.com. We migrated to Retool when they needed more complex financial reporting. Now we're migrating again to a fully custom application using vibe coding—Retool's UI wasn't flexible enough, and honestly, vibe coding is now faster for me than building in Retool.
Each migration happened when we hit the ceiling of the current paradigm. That's the pattern.
Keep in mind: I'm a professional software engineer. I understand coding. When I use vibe coding, I'm correcting the AI, guiding it, catching its mistakes. I'm not blindly entering prompts and shipping whatever comes out.
The Bottom Line
The paradigm wars are over. It's not either/or.
Real systems use multiple approaches. The skill is knowing which tool for which job. An API call here, a nocode integration there, vibe coding for the custom pieces, traditional code for the parts that need optimization.
Vibe coding is transformative. But it's early. Technical expertise is still the differentiator. The people who benefit most are the ones who already understand what good code looks like.
If you're building systems in 2025, learn to work across paradigms. That's the edge.