The Mini-App Era
LLMs, vibe coding, and a new kind of internet made by people.
It’s easier than ever to just make internet things without knowing how to code. LLMs have opened the door to a mini-app era, where anyone can make websites, chatbots, games, etc. without a team of experts. This isn’t to say engineers may be replaced by AI. They remain essential, especially for building complex systems. But what’s changed is that a level of app creation is now accessible to everyone. You don’t need deep technical skill to bring an idea to life anymore. You only need a prompt.
Andrej Karpathy recently wrote about the technological diffusion of LLMs which dissects their atypical path of product adoption. “LLMs display a dramatic reversal of the typical top-down diffusion path - they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments.”
Karpathy goes on to talk about individual vs. organizational adoption and so on, and makes compelling, and real, points about why LLM consumer adoption is so serious.
“The new programming language is English, and the compiler is ChatGPT.”
Vibe coding only became a term in the last 3 months. It’s what happens when you open an LLM, describe an idea in your spoken language, and it spits out the bones of an app. You try it, tweak it, ask for something better, rewrite, etc. The LLM is the go-between for our wanting to make stuff and the actual code.
This kind of “microcreativity” (casual, fast, small-scale creation) is reshaping how we exist on the internet.
From Consumers to Creators
One of the most exciting shifts LLMs bring is the move from passively using the internet to actively shaping it. You don’t have to be a developer or designer to make something anymore.
You just need a chatbot.
Everyday people are testing and building small things like workflow organizers, games for friends, bots that respond with an attitude, etc. Nobody is really trying to be the next unicorn startup, they’re using tools because they’re available and relatively free.
Also, these lil projects aren’t in the App Store, they exist as web apps shared with friends and followers in group chats, in Discords, on X... Which is the point.
The rise of personal, one-off apps isn’t just a byproduct of this moment—it defines it.
A Cultural Shift
Just like Canva made design feel casual and accessible, LLMs are doing that for code. Not in a “learn to code” kind of way—in a make something right now and see how it feels kind of way.
This shift isn’t technical, it’s cultural. And it’s changed how people relate to software: from something you use → to something you can shape.
The fact that anyone can spin up a weird little mini-app with a prompt is a massive shift in creative power, it redistributes who gets to make software (not just use it).
We’re just making stuff and that’s pretty sick.