The comments under our recent Amorph piece have been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks.
Some BPB readers are excited about being able to type “give me an overdrive that sounds like a Tube Screamer” and get a working plugin out the other end. Others are pretty concerned that we’re about to drown in a sea of half-functional, untested code.
I’m somewhere in between. Both reactions make perfect sense to me.
And it’s not happening just here on BPB.
Over on KVR Audio, there’s a thread titled “Vibe coded plugins” that’s pretty direct. The poster says these things are popping up everywhere, they don’t trust them, and they won’t use them. The replies mostly agree.
But the longer I thought about this argument, the more it sounded familiar. Then it hit me. We’ve had this exact fight before. It was just called something else.
The SynthEdit stigma
If you’ve been around music software in the last couple of decades, you’ll remember this one.
Around the mid-2000s, SynthEdit (and later SynthMaker and FlowStone) made it possible to build a working VST without writing a line of C++. You patched together modules in a visual environment, clicked compile, and had something you could load in your DAW.
The plugin community had a name for the result. “SynthEdit plugin” became shorthand for “amateur, probably buggy, probably not worth installing.” Forum posts would dismiss whole categories of freeware on sight.
The implication was the same one we’re hearing now. If you didn’t write the DSP yourself, the plugin couldn’t possibly be any good.
From my experience, a lot of that reputation was earned.
Plenty of SynthEdit freeware really was thrown together. But the dismissal also caught a lot of legitimate work in the net, including plugins from developers who knew what they were doing and picked SynthEdit because it was the right tool for the job.
Actually, I still see good ones turn up.
Marco Dodin’s Cross The Bridge, a free guitar amp suite we covered in March, was built in SynthEdit and took the developer about two years of patient signal-chain work. It’s a perfectly solid plugin that just happens to use a tool many people have written off.
Also, the KVR Developer Challenge has always allowed SynthEdit and FlowStone entries. The rules for the 2026 edition, which is live now and accepting submissions until July 5th, still list them by name alongside C++ and Delphi.
What’s different this time
Of course, vibe coding isn’t exactly the same situation. But it’s not apples and oranges, either.
Here’s what’s different.
SynthEdit was a visual modular environment where the person building the plugin could see what they were patching together. Vibe coding hands you a wall of code that whoever “made” the plugin probably can’t read, much less debug.
That matters because audio is a real-time system. A plugin that drops a buffer or mishandles memory crashes a session. A badly coded plugin can destroy your work on a project, or, even worse, it can cause loud bursts of noise that damage your hearing.
On the other hand, a vibe-coded web app that breaks just shows you a sad face.
Real-time audio code has a much narrower margin for error, and AI-generated code has a habit of producing things that look right and then fail in ways that are hard to track down.
So if you’re worried about the quality of the plugins we’ll be installing two years from now, that’s a fair concern. I share it.
There’s going to be a lot of broken stuff that we’ll need to filter through.
What’s the same
But the social pattern is almost identical.
A new tool lowers the barrier. People who don’t understand coding can suddenly create something that once required years of training.
The people who put in those years are not thrilled about it. The arguments are lining up almost word-for-word with what I remember from the SynthEdit era.
And there’s something else worth pointing out.
Among all the SynthEdit and SynthMaker slop, there were dozens of real gems. These were plugins that were truly awesome and probably wouldn’t have been created without the help of those development tools.
Variety of Sound stuff is the obvious example, although it uses custom code and mainly uses SynthMaker for the GUIs. But there are other examples, like HG Fortune instruments (rest in peace), Drumatic 3 by E-Phonic, Tweakbench plugins, Genesis Pro, and K Brown Synths, that relied much more heavily on SynthEdit/SynthMaker and also received a lot of praise.
I’m very curious how many AI-assisted plugins are going to land in that same category over the next year or two. The unexpected, weird, creative, niche ones that nobody would have written by hand because either they aren’t coders or because the cost-benefit didn’t add up.
Stuck in the middle
I’m not picking a side here because I don’t think there’s a clean side to pick.
Honestly, I’m worried about the quality of the software landscape over the next few years. I think the fear that some of these plugins shouldn’t be trusted is understandable, and that the flood of vibe-coded plugins is real (my email inbox is proof of it).
I also hope that the blanket “vibe coded equals garbage” stance is going to age badly, the same way “SynthEdit plugin” did.
The thing I find interesting is the long tail. Most commercial plugin development is driven by what enough people will pay for. That’s a sensible business model, but it means many weird, specific, personal ideas never get built.
A producer who wants a synth modeled on an obscure 80s preset machine, or a MIDI processor that does one strange thing nobody else needs. Those tools have always been out of reach. Now they aren’t, at least in theory.
If even a small fraction of vibe-coded plugins turn out to be the kind of thing no commercial developer would have made, that’s a net win for the community. The rest will sort itself out the way it always has, with users sharing what’s good and quietly ignoring what isn’t.
So yeah, I’m half worried and half curious.
We cover new plugin releases on BPB pretty much every day, and 2026 has already brought a lot of AI-related stuff through the door. I’m filtering out a lot of it, but curious to see if we’ll see any real gems this year.
And if you’re entering the KVR Developer Challenge with an AI-assisted plugin this year, I’d love to hear about it. Just please test it.
Last Updated on April 23, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
