The Vibe Coding Census — July 2026 (Vol. 2)

Next.js is the default, not a choice

Of the 449 projects we fingerprinted, 201 — 45% — serve confirmed Next.js markers. Everything else is single digits: Express, WordPress, Framer, Astro, Vite SPAs. The share held perfectly steady while the gallery grew 35% — this isn't an artifact of a small sample, it's the shape of the population.

We don't think 201 makers independently evaluated frameworks and converged. The AI tools did: Claude, Cursor, v0, Lovable and Bolt all reach for Next.js when you say “build me an app.” Vibe coding doesn't just change who builds — it centralizes how everything gets built. The default stack of the AI era is whatever the models were trained to reach for.

Hosting: the Vercel–Cloudflare duopoly

Vercel headers show up on 173 projects, Cloudflare on 153 (often as the CDN in front of something else). The classic indie stack of a VPS and nginx has practically vanished from this population: deploy is a git push or a prompt, never a server.

Builders build for builders

Developer tools and productivity apps top the chart — a third of the gallery. The first instinct of someone who just gained the power to ship software is, apparently, to fix their own workflow. Games, education and health are underweight relative to how often they're tried once published — an opportunity, if you're deciding what to build this weekend.

How they say they built it

New since the last census: Build Receipts mined from makers' own posts and public repos, with provenance tracked per field. 21 projects name the AI tool they built with — and the Claude family (Claude + Claude Code, 25 mentions) leads Cursor, ChatGPT and everything else combined.

Team size is knowable for 113 projects (from contributor counts on public repos, or the maker's own words): 79% are solo. Where we can date a repo from first commit to last push, timelines run from one day to ongoing — the modal vibe-coded project is one person, shipped fast, still moving.

Open source is the exception

Only 20 of 449 projects (4.5%) link a verified public repo — we check that every repo actually resolves before we count it; six more advertised repos that turned out to be private or deleted, and those don't count. Stars range from zero to ArtPlayer's 3,845 (a mature library whose site predates the vibe-coding wave). Another 10 projects ship their entire source map to production — which let us read their real file trees. Fun finding: two apparently unrelated projects had byte-identical dependency fingerprints. Same secret author? No — both were Laravel Livewire apps, and what we'd mined was the framework's own bundle. The fingerprinter now knows the difference.

Where these projects come from

87% of the gallery was first spotted on X — mostly in “drop what you're building” threads where makers announce their work. Show HN contributes a steady trickle, and a handful arrive from V2EX and direct submissions. If you want to know what people are building with AI this week, the answer is still: read the replies.

The graveyard is open

Live checking is the whole premise of this gallery, and it now has consequences on record. Two projects have already been buried: their URLs went dark and stayed dark — one within days of being published. Free-tier hosting dies fast. Three more projects are currently at risk (3–4 consecutive failed checks) and will join them if their makers don't notice. We never auto-archive on a single failure — but we do keep the graves. Visit the graveyard.

The flip side: we started tracking uptime streaks this week, and the longest continuous streak is already 7 days. Watch that number — a “Nd up” badge on a card is the quietest trust signal we have.