An SEO specialist’s evening used to look like this: log in to Keitaro, renew the subscription, sigh and grumble a little, then configure campaign flows by hand.
In 2026, a more advanced SEO specialist takes a different approach: open a terminal, tell an AI agent, “Build me a tracker. Here are the credentials. Leave me alone,” and go make some tea. By morning, they have their own TDS (traffic distribution system), with every campaign migrated.
I know: it sounds like a story from a bot whose profile links to a “Make $2,000,000 with Vibe Coding” course. But this is an almost word-for-word account of posts by real, working SEO specialists. Affiliates are building their own trackers, analytics dashboards, and entire AI departments—and some have already canceled subscriptions to their usual tools.
Let’s look at the trend, who can make the numbers work, and who has simply found an expensive replacement for Instagram and fishing in Red Dead Redemption 2. Complete with figures, names, secret meeting places and passwords, and links to the original sources.
What Is Vibe Coding, and How Did It Reach Affiliate Marketing?
The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former head of AI at Tesla. In February 2025, he posted on X about a new kind of programming where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Nine months later, Collins Dictionary named vibe coding its word of the year. Its definition is less colorful but more precise: using AI to write code by describing what you want in natural language
| In plain English: you tell the machine WHAT to do, rather than HOW to do it. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex—AI agents that run in your terminal—write the code, run it, and fix errors themselves. Your role is to specify what you need, rather than program it. |
In affiliate marketing and SEO, the idea landed on fertile ground. This industry has always followed the rule “build the tool you need yourself or die suffer.” Previously, though, getting from an idea to a working tool meant a $300 freelancer and three weeks of messages. Now it means an agent that never gets tired or disappears after taking a deposit.
Industry Telegram channels show just how far the trend has spread:
- Naumov (in Russian), a solo SEO specialist in the nutra niche, is vibe coding a dashboard to manage hundreds of websites.
- The author of «Гембла с ебанцой» (in Russian) keeps Claude open “in 2–3 browser tabs, with something useful always being built in them.”
- After “3 months of bloody battles with Claude Code,” the author of «Поживи в лесу» (in Russian) can now build a complete website in 30–40 minutes.
- «Сеошим гемблу» (in Russian) publishes beginner guides to setting up an entire infrastructure with Codex. The author rates her own coding skills at 4 out of 10 (in Russian), which did not stop her from setting up automation “in a few nights.”
Post from «Поживи в лесу» about building a website in 30–40 minutes with Claude Code
Why Affiliates Build Their Own TDS, Trackers, and Dashboards
Several things are driving the trend, and real examples make them easiest to understand.
Speed and economics. About five years ago, Naumov commissioned a dashboard from a programmer friend (in Russian) for roughly $300. He ended up with a prototype he barely used because he still had to retrieve and enter the data manually. This year, he rebuilt it himself with Claude Code, without a programmer.
His other calculation is even more revealing: through just one freelance marketplace account, he spent about $27,000 on copywriters over five years (in Russian). Now, generating content costs him $30–50 a month in API usage.
| “Why pay for someone else’s service if AI can build one for you?” becomes an obvious question when Keitaro’s official website lists prices of $40–104 a month. That is hardly ruinous, but it is an ongoing rental: stop paying, and you lose the tool. |
A tool built for you, rather than the average user. The biggest attraction of vibe coding is getting features that an off-the-shelf product does not offer and never will. For years, Naumov wanted “smart trafficback” in his tracker: if a visitor comes from a country with no matching offer, send them to a similar offer in the same category rather than a dead end. Setting this up manually required a separate campaign for each category (in Russian) and constant adjustments, but added about 10% to profit. His custom TDS now handles it automatically.
The author of «Гембла с ебанцой» tells a similar story about her analytics dashboard: “Everyone else has already built their own. Why shouldn’t I?” It also has custom features, such as viewing statistics for any chosen list of websites across all her Search Console accounts at once.
Scale that pushes standard plans to their limits. Here are figures from the same channels:
- Naumov’s tracker contains 500+ campaigns and 5000+ flows (in Russian);
- the author of «Гембла с ебанцой» generated 1000 websites in four months (in Russian);
- the «Сеошим гемблу» team built 500 websites in six months (in Russian).
With hundreds of domains, the cost of every paid service gets multiplied: plan limits and extra charges for domains, users, and API requests all add up. Your own tool costs only the server rental.
Independence and control over data. For gray-area niches, these are practical concerns. Among his reasons for leaving Keitaro, Naumov specifically mentions card-only payments and VAT added to the price (in Russian)—“just what we need in our gray-area industry.” There is also the reluctance to keep every campaign’s statistics in someone else’s service and depend on their suspensions, updates, and pricing decisions.
Vibe Coding vs. Keitaro: An Honest Comparison
Now for the reality check—one that will sound familiar to anyone who has already vibe coded at least three more-or-less functional tools. The headline “Do You Still Need Keitaro?” was deliberately provocative, and the examples above suggest you might not. In practice, even the people driving this trend make much more modest claims.
In April, Naumov, who had paid for Keitaro for seven years (in Russian), gave Claude Code SSH access—remote command-line access—to the server running his tracker and described what he wanted. “It literally built the first version in one evening and migrated all the campaigns and flows.” But that same post ends with a caveat every enthusiastic new vibe coder should pin above their bed: “Obviously, this homemade solution won’t suit affiliates with their traffic volumes, data analysis, and cloaking. But for my SEO tasks, it does the job.”
| The difference matters. An off-the-shelf tracker offers more than redirects and statistics. It comes with support that answers late at night when you launch a campaign; updates and security patches that arrive without your involvement; bot filters and anti-fraud tools tested across thousands of customers; ad account integrations; team access with roles; and documentation. A custom TDS has just one thing on that list: you and Claude Code at three in the morning. |
Security is a separate headache. «Сеошим гемблу» puts it bluntly (in Russian): expecting AI to vibe code a website network “without security holes” is naive. “Your vibe will build the sites; someone else’s vibe will take you down.” Code nobody has read is code nobody has checked for vulnerabilities. That matters when the tool handles all your traffic and statistics.
English translation of a post originally published in Russian on Naumov’s Telegram channel. An honest assessment looks like this:
- A solo SEO specialist with a website network, custom routing logic, and traffic that already goes through an API rather than the tracker is an obvious candidate for a custom TDS.
- A media buying operation with any significant traffic volume, a team, cloaking, and anti-fraud requirements has no need for a vibe-coded replacement.
With Keitaro, the $40–104 monthly fee buys more than redirects: it buys freedom from having to solve most of these problems yourself.
The Downsides: Vibe Coding as a Hobby and a Form of Procrastination
The trend has a downside, and the people involved discuss it as openly as their successes. They deserve credit for that.
First, AI-generated code regularly does bizarre things. Naumov compared his vibe coding to Jenga (in Russian), “where the tower falls after every move I make.” Instead of supplement descriptions, his content generator published a review of a 2007 shooter and a list of snus flavors. On another occasion, Claude configured the generator with one model’s price but used a different model. What should have cost $18 ended up costing $112.
The author of «Гембла с ебанцой» even accidentally installed Linux (in Russian). She only noticed Claude’s comment, “This command will install Linux,” after pressing Enter.
Second—and this is the real catch—vibe coding is suspiciously enjoyable. The author of «Поживи в лесу» freely admits that the new websites have not made a profit yet and are only starting to get impressions. But “the process itself is fascinating: I used to fish in Red Dead Redemption 2; now I argue with Claude Code.” It is perfect procrastination for a workaholic: code gets written, tools multiply, and you feel incredibly productive, while the traffic still is not coming in. Polishing tools instead of working is like buying running shoes and spending a month choosing the right socks. Technically, you have almost started running.
The test is simple. If a custom dashboard saves you hours within a couple of weeks, it is a tool. If you are still “finishing it off” three months later instead of driving traffic, you have acquired an expensive hobby with tokens instead of fishing lures.
Third, AI does not do your thinking for you. «Сеошим гемблу» shares a takeaway from a Stanford lecture (in Russian) that is worth a whole course: “AI doesn’t replace architecture; it amplifies what is already there. If a project is chaotic, AI turns that chaos into a disaster at 10x speed.” The same post discusses the “illusion of understanding”: everything works and the code looks clever, but you no longer control the system. «Поживи в лесу» has a workplace story (in Russian) to match: one enthusiastic vibe coder hired another while the team lead was busy on a different project. Three months later, both were fired “because all hell broke loose.”
What This Means in Practice
The trend is real. Despite its pitfalls, vibe coding is more than a passing distraction: it is a practical skill that can make your projects financially viable.
When you can build a tool for your particular needs in an evening rather than pay a freelancer for a month’s work, some subscriptions will inevitably get canceled. The first to go are services where affiliates use only 10% of the features: a tracker used only for redirects, for example, or a dashboard used for a single metric. But Keitaro is not going anywhere yet. It still serves people with high traffic volumes, teams, or no desire to act as their own support agent, tester, and every other specialist rolled into one.
A custom TDS suits solo operators with website networks, unusual routing requirements, and a willingness to debug. Yet even they—as their own posts make clear—describe what they have built as “good enough for my needs.” These tools hardly look like tracker killers.
Think of vibe coding as a new power screwdriver. It drives screws faster, but you still have to draw the plans. Without plans, it will simply build you a crooked cabinet faster. And you have already paid for the materials. Such is life.
FAQ
You describe a task to an AI agent in plain language, and it writes and runs the code itself. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI in February 2025, and Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year for 2025.
Keitaro—$40 to $104 per month according to the official website. Custom TDS—server rental (a few to several dozen dollars) plus a subscription to an AI agent, which you probably already have. But add the hidden cost: your time for debugging and the risks of code without support.
In the foreseeable future—no. Mostly SEOs with API traffic and simple scenarios go custom. Media buying with anti-fraud, cloaking, and teamwork stays on boxed solutions—confirmed by the authors of custom TDS themselves.
Not with a tracker. Start with a small helper script—adding sites to Search Console, exporting stats, checking links. Break the task into small steps and test each one—that’s the main lesson from everyone who’s already been down this road. A tracker with money inside is the last step, not the first.
Not AI hallucinations, but the illusion of control. The code works, but you don’t know how. For a landing page, that’s tolerable; for a system handling your money and data, it’s not. Review, back up, and don’t give the agent access where mistakes are irreversible.
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