Every one of these platforms will take a sentence and hand you a running application. That part is settled, and it works. What separates them is everything that happens afterwards: what the bill looks like in month three, whether you can take the code somewhere else, and whether the app is open to the internet by default.

They also get lumped into one category when they belong in three. Hosted prompt-to-app builders (Lovable, Base44, Bolt, Replit) generate and host the whole thing. UI-first generators like v0 hand you code and leave hosting to you. Editor and terminal agents such as Cursor and Claude Code sit inside a real repository and assume you can read the output. Security researchers draw the line in the same place, and for a reason: the editor tools require a human to review code before it ships, while the builders generate, execute and deploy with almost no oversight in between.

Vibe coding is fine for code you’re going to throw away, and most of the fighting about it is really people disagreeing about which code that is.

Last month I needed a script to pull a CSV off a shared drive, reshape three columns, and push the rows into an API. I described it, ran what came back, fixed one wrong column name, and never read the rest. It worked. It ran twice and I deleted it. Reading that code line by line would have cost me an afternoon and bought me nothing.