The use of artificial intelligence for “vibe coding” will replace the role of UX/UI frontend engineers with designers and product managers within a year or two, according to Keren Fanan, co-founder and CEO of Israeli AI platform MyOp.
Fanan spoke to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday after organizing the first vibe coding hackathon for students at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, which aimed to prove that anyone can create platform features without a developer background.
“Vibe coding” refers to using AI to create code without the need for a previous technical background.
“The idea came from PicTime, a very successful platform that photographers use to manage their entire business. They use our platform, MyOp, as their internal vibe coding tool,” explained Fanan.
“It’s part of a concept we’ve been implementing at PicTime for about ten months. We’ve changed the roles of our designers and product managers. We’ve changed the title from ‘Designer’ to ‘Builder,’” Hanan Lehr, chief UX officer at Pictime, told the Post.
“AI, together with MyOp, allows us to take our designs and turn them into real, functional products without needing a front-end developer. The hackathon was an experiment to get new ideas and talent,” he added.
“Every group, including the winners, brought a complex component into fully functioning code during the hackathon, ready to be used by the PicTime dev team. People got the concept of vibe coding so quickly, even those with no background in writing code,” Fanan explained.
According to Lehr, adopting the MyOp platform was “surprisingly easy,” while he assured that the new workflow system allowed him to do work that used to take weeks in a matter of hours. “Technically, though, it was simple. I spoke with the AI and gave it 120 prompts in one day. It was like talking to a human developer, telling it what I wanted, and it did it immediately,” he said.
According to Fanan, the platform works as a link between AI-generated code and larger, more mature stacks. “It’s not just about vibe coding a new app from scratch. For example, PicTime has been around for 10 years with millions of users and a very complex stack. We are putting AI-written code from people outside the organization into it,” she said.
“Within a year or two, I believe development teams won’t just be engineers. Engineers will handle the ‘backbone,’ backend logic, databases, and state management, but the entire user-facing part will be developed by non-technical people, specifically designers or product managers using vibe coding tools,” she added.
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Fanan also explained that MyOp is not working to create an AI model to compete with OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, but to be able to develop infrastructure capable of taking AI-created output and adding it to other appliances
“We wrap the builder’s code as a standalone component that communicates with the inner logic through a secure, unique contract. This creates a bridge between the new world of AI coding and ‘legacy’ systems,” Fanan explained.
“Our output is much bigger,” assured Lehr, and also added that Pic-Time managed to “remove the ‘developer in the middle.’ “In the traditional method, you give instructions to a developer, they build it, and then the client sees it. Now, we build it and show it to the client immediately,” he said.
When asked about how MyOp users handle bug-fixing, Fanan explained, “Our rule at MyOp is: you should only build what you can validate. If I’m a PM, I can validate the visual experience: the buttons, the dropdowns, the flow. If it requires complex backend logic that I can’t verify without reading code, that task isn’t for me.”
When a visual or UX bug is discovered, the designer returns the AI to the prompt, requests a fix, and redeploys. If it’s an authentication or API bug, it goes to the engineer. We’re actually seeing the script flip: developers are now opening bugs for UX professionals to fix in the UI.”
Vibe coding hackathon: What was the experience for the students?
Hilel Dror, one of the students who participated in the hackathon, told the Post that AI-based vibe coding helps improve work capacity. “The most significant change in my workflow is the sheer number of iterations I can now complete in an hour. Ultimately, more iterations naturally lead to a much better design,” he said.
“It definitely has a positive impact on my profession. It opens up capabilities that simply didn’t exist for me before. I see this as a major trend that is turning designers into people who design actual, working products; it’s an ‘all-inclusive’ process now,” he added.
But this was not the case with every participant. According to Mia Ganon, who also spoke with the Post, Figma (a design tool for UX/UI development) still allows for a more controlled final product. “I can take a design to much further lengths there, mold it into anything I can come up with, and have it look different than the norm, without compromise,” she said.
“With vibe-coding, you’re working within what the AI interprets and what the underlying code naturally wants to do. There’s a ceiling on how opinionated you can get visually, at least for now,” Ganon added.
For both of them, language is the main barrier to the application of AI-based coding solutions. “The most frustrating part was definitely the language barrier. I could only communicate my design intent verbally through prompts. Because these AI models aren’t visual, object-oriented HTML editors, making isolated tweaks was incredibly hard,” Dror explained.
“The hardest constraint to shake off is the defaults. These models are trained on existing interactions, components, and interfaces, and the reality is that there are far more ‘sufficient’ designs in the world than there are truly interesting, innovative, or expressive ones. So the AI tends to naturally pull toward the familiar,” Ganon added.
Even with these limitations, Lehr saw in the final results ideas that had not been considered during the ten-month period since MyOp was implemented in the Pic-Time platform. “The creativity and enthusiasm were huge. We worked from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and the ideas kept coming. Because these are design students, we didn’t just get prototypes; at the end of the day, we had functioning features,” he said.
“We saw so many ideas, big and small, that made us wonder, ‘How did we not think of this ourselves over all these years?’ We got a massive concentration of innovation in just one day,” he added.