The future of vibe coding tools

By Aatu Väisänen

November 20th, 2025

Most of the new, shiny AI code editors and AI-to-app tools (a.k.a. vibe coding platforms) will lose relevance in a couple of years.

Why?

Well, let me explain by starting with the basics.

AI code editors

Any regular code editor (for example VS Code or a full-fetched IDE like JetBrains) becomes an AI code editor the moment you glue AI (a large-language model, LLM) to it and ask the AI to write code for you automatically. In a nutshell, this can mean three things:

1. Suggesting to auto-complete the lines that you are typing

2. Profoundly explaining parts of the code project for you...

3. ... Or agentic mode, which means that the AI writes all of the code based on your prompts.

Popular examples of these purpose-built AI code editors are Cursor and Windsurf, which have gained a lot of traction in the past year or so.

AI-to-app tools

AI-to-app tools, like Lovable, v0, and Bolt.new are solely focused on agentic AI. In a nutshell, each of these tools are the same as the agentic mode in an AI code editor, the code side of things is just abstracted behind a fancy loading screen and a chat input. In fact, you could in theory accomplish most of what these tools do in a AI code editor like Cursor, given that you have crafted the prompts needed for this purpose.

There is nothing special about most them!

Basically anyone can create their own version of a AI-to-app tool. Heck, Vercel even encourages to build your own one using their v0 Platform API [1]. It's the same with AI code editors: with Microsoft announcing their latest progress on making VS Code the go-to open source AI code editor [2], the ground has been laid for anyone creating their own hyped fork of VS Code, and calling it the most revolutionary AI code editor ever.

And for the explanation...

So, what's my point with all of this?

Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the AI hype train has been churning forward without signs of stopping. The big tech AI infrastructure spending spree will pass a trillion dollars in 2026. All of the additional compute power will mean that AI will become even more commonplace than now, especially in the realm of coding. However, with the vast amount of new AI code generation tools popping regularly, I'd argue that we will sooner or later see an apocalypse for these tools.

Let's look at history for a reference. When the internet bubble was about to burst, there were a lot of startups doing basically the same things built around internet hype, just packaged in their own neat versions. Ultimately when the bubble burst, most of these startups vanished into thin air: only a few key players barely survived. The lesson from this? When a new revolutionary technology advancement happens, the transition towards fully harnessing the potential for said technology doesn't happen overnight. For internet it took over a decade before its true potential was unchained.

Conclusion. Is an AI code tool meltdown coming?

With the huge amount of capital being spent in the push to make AI the biggest productivity leap in the 21st century, it's quite easy to see what the end-game for the hundreds of AI code startups will be: get acquired by a bigger player, or cease to exist.

Let's take Cursor as an example: when it first came out, it was really cool and innovative, but it didn't last long until a bunch of other startups spinned up their own version of an AI code editor. Additionally VS Code (which Cursor was built on) has adopted most, if not all of the features that were new and fancy in Cursor originally.

Some of these tools will eventually be bought by bigger companies: for example Windsurf made a multi-billion dollar deal to license their technology for Google (which led to Google releasing Antigravity in November 2025), before getting fully aqcuired by Cognition. But, one thing is clear: in a clearly inflated AI vibe coding market, there will eventually be only a few winners.

Sources:

[1] Build your own AI app builder with the v0 Platform API https://vercel.com/blog/build-your-own-ai-app-builder-with-the-v0-platform-api

[2] Open Source AI Editor: Second Milestone https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/11/04/openSourceAIEditorSecondMilestone