The era of vibe coding — the practice of building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting artificial intelligence handle the rest — is here.
The AI company Anthropic recently sponsored a hackathon that drew 13,000 applicants — and most of the winners weren’t engineers or even in tech. It’s the latest sign that the future of innovation belongs to the people who understand problems, not necessarily the people who can code.
“There’s always been a tech barrier between domain expertise and coding,” said Dr. Michał Nedoszytko, an interventional cardiologist based in Brussels who took third place in the competition. “[But now] if anyone has enough expertise, they can create advanced solutions. Programming is solved.”
A source close to Anthropic noted that the company’s hackathons have seen a surge in submissions from non-technical applicants over the last six months.
Nedoszytko tinkered with code for years but could never quite bridge the gap between his medical expertise and the products he envisioned building. But advancements in AI over the last few months alone changed that.
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He built PostVisit.ai, a platform that guides patients after they leave the doctor’s office. Too often, patients walk out of appointments overwhelmed and confused, PostVisit.ai explains their diagnosis and treatment plan in simple language online.
“Healthcare is being redefined,” Nedoszytko said.
First place went to lawyer Mike Brown for CrossBeam — a tool that cuts through California’s tedious permitting process for accessory dwelling units.
Other winners included an electronic musician who built a generative AI band, and an Ugandan infrastructure worker whose tool turns road footage into investment recommendations.
The competition offered $100,000 in Claude API credits — tokens that let developers access and build with Anthropic’s AI models — split among winners, and challenged participants to build tools using the company’s new Opus 4.6 model and Claude Code, its agentic coding tool.
Wall Street is bullish on the advancements. “This is going to create so much more innovation… we will be able to harness so much brain power,” Dan Ives, the veteran tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, told me. “This is not going to structurally unseat tech companies — it’s the democratization of coding.”
He added. “This is the Jetsons, not the Flintstones.”
Nedoszytko, who is now focused on raising money and building more medical AI products, is also excited about the technology. “This is the time to build,” he said. “The time is now.”
