AI "vibe coding" upends the music software business

Today’s Focus

A wave of AI-assisted “vibe coding” tools is pushing hobbyists and small developers into the music gear business, flooding the market with cheap or free plugins, synthesizers and effects that used to require teams of engineers to build.

The Verge, in a feature published this month, documented how non-programmers are using AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Cursor to generate working audio software in days, often without writing original code themselves. The term “vibe coding” was popularized by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy in a February 2025 post describing the practice of prompting a model, accepting its suggestions, and iterating by feel rather than reading the output.

Independent developers interviewed by The Verge said they have shipped VST plugins, Max for Live devices and standalone synths built almost entirely from AI output. Some are giving the tools away. Others are undercutting established companies like Native Instruments, iZotope and Arturia, whose products often sell for $100 to $500.

The Verge reported that forums such as KVR Audio and Reddit’s r/audioengineering have seen a surge of posts from first-time developers asking for feedback on AI-built plugins. Established gear makers have begun warning customers about security risks, intellectual-property questions and audio quality in machine-generated code.

Business Insider and Wired have separately reported that vibe coding is spreading beyond music into games, productivity apps and internal corporate tools, with venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz publicly backing the trend. The music gear sector, dominated by small and mid-sized firms, is one of the first consumer software markets where the economic effects are visible at scale.

The Debate

Supporters argue

Backers see vibe coding as a long-overdue democratization of a field that has been gatekept by expensive tools and specialized DSP (digital signal processing) knowledge. Karpathy, in the post that coined the term, wrote that with modern models “it’s not really coding, I just see things, say things, run things, and copy-paste things, and it mostly works.”

Riley Brown, a developer profiled by The Verge, said AI tools let him ship plugins that would have taken a trained engineering team months. Supporters point out that most new music software has always been built by hobbyists; AI simply lowers the barrier further.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado has argued publicly that AI coding assistants expand the pool of people who can build real products, not just prototypes. Independent artists on Reddit and KVR Audio told The Verge that free AI-built plugins have let them produce records they could not otherwise afford to make.

Supporters also note that incumbent music software companies have themselves integrated AI features, including iZotope’s assistive mixing tools and Native Instruments’ sound-matching systems, suggesting the industry sees the technology as additive rather than purely destructive.

Critics argue

Established developers and some musicians warn that the flood of AI-generated plugins is already degrading quality and trust in the market. Urs Heckmann, founder of plugin maker u-he, told The Verge that audio code requires precision that current models frequently fail to deliver, and that bugs in signal processing can damage speakers or hearing.

Critics also raise copyright concerns. Because models were trained on existing codebases, including open-source audio libraries with specific licenses, lawyers quoted by Wired have questioned whether AI-generated plugins quietly incorporate protected code. The Free Software Foundation has argued that such output can violate the GPL license attached to many audio projects.

Small developers who built businesses over years say they are being undercut by free tools their creators do not fully understand. Some, including developers on the KVR Audio forum cited by The Verge, say they have seen their own designs cloned within weeks of release by prompt-engineered copies.

Security researchers at firms including Snyk have warned that AI-generated code often contains vulnerabilities the “author” cannot spot, raising risks for anyone installing hobby plugins on a studio machine.

What the experts say

Research on AI coding assistants paints a mixed picture. A 2024 study by GitClear, which analyzed 153 million lines of code, found that AI-assisted code showed higher rates of churn and duplication than human-written code, suggesting more rework and lower long-term maintainability.

A separate 2025 field study by METR, a nonprofit AI evaluations lab, found that experienced open-source developers using AI tools took 19% longer to complete tasks than those working without them, even though participants believed the tools made them faster. The gap was largest on complex, domain-specific code, the category most audio work falls into.

Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index reported that generative coding tools have driven measurable productivity gains for routine tasks but noted that quality and security outcomes vary widely by domain. The U.S. Copyright Office, in a January 2025 report, concluded that purely AI-generated output is not eligible for copyright protection, leaving the legal status of many vibe-coded plugins unsettled.

By the Numbers

$7.6 billion: estimated size of the global music software market in 2024, according to Grand View Research.

19%: slowdown in task completion time for experienced developers using AI coding tools in a 2025 METR randomized study.

153 million: lines of code analyzed in GitClear’s 2024 study, which found rising churn in AI-assisted codebases.

February 2025: when Andrej Karpathy’s post popularized the phrase “vibe coding,” according to The Verge.

$100 to $500: typical price range of commercial music plugins from firms like Native Instruments and iZotope, per The Verge.

0%: share of purely AI-generated work the U.S. Copyright Office recognized as eligible for copyright in its January 2025 report.

1.6 million: approximate number of plugins and presets listed on KVR Audio, the main independent music software directory, as of 2025.