A 39-year-old accountant knew AI was coming for his job — so he started vibe coding

• Longtime accountant Wei Khjan Chan told Business Insider that he learned vibration coding to stay ahead of AI.

• Chan said he felt the pressure mount as headlines warned that AI could replace jobs like his.

• He told BI how he is using AI and learning from vibration coding to make a bigger impact in accounting.

Wei Khjan Chan has been working as an accountant for more than 18 years; this profession is often marked as accountant. automation risk. He said he feels the pressure mount every time he sees headlines warning that AI could replace jobs like his.

“It would be great if I learned about AI sooner. At least I would change myself instead of letting others replace me,” the 39-year-old told Business Insider.

To stay ahead of the trend, Chan received vibration codingUsing AI tools to write code and develop applications. An audit partner at an accounting and consulting firm in Malaysia said he came across jitter coding in June after attending weekend coding workshops in Singapore and Malaysia.

Despite having no technical background, Chan developed a web application to solve a pain point in his professional life: filing expense claims after business trips.

The app uses AI-powered optical character recognition to scan and process receipts, automatically exporting them to files for the company’s finance teams. It also uses artificial intelligence to automate workflow, such as creating invoices.

“This code is a bunch of JavaScript, and I honestly don’t understand it,” he told Business Insider, showing off the web app. “An accountant cannot do this without the vibration coding tools and skill set,” he added.

Artificial intelligence is not the ticket out of accounting; What matters is how you save it.

The accountant said he didn’t learn vibration coding to make a career change. Instead, he sees “AI know-how” as an essential skill for any office job, such as Excel.

Developing his own apps showed him how powerful the tools could be: What once took weeks to build a proof of concept for an entire team to prototype can now be built in a single weekend, he said.

Chan also told Business Insider that he advocates for broader adoption. As a committee member at the local accounting institute in Malaysia, he lobbies for more AI training at scale.

Fewer people are turning to accounting even as the demand for accounting services increases. Chan said that since manpower is in short supply, artificial intelligence can help fill the gap.

Lessons learned from Vibe coding

Chan said that when he first started experimenting with AI, he was advised to write long, detailed prompts of “full context length.” But experience has taught him that smaller, iterative steps work better.

“The first warning is very important to get everything set up right,” he said. From now on, when changes are needed, it’s more effective to adjust a small piece at a time rather than crowding the entire wish list.

It’s approaching like this managing interns: Break tasks into smaller, precise instructions. “The more specific you can be, the better the outcome,” he said.

Not every lesson came easily. In one project, Chan built the database based on a single organization. Then he realized he had to rebuild the entire structure when someone asked for multi-company support.

“This is a very fundamental change,” he said. “I messed up everything.”

Experience has taught him that getting the architecture right at the beginning is critical because features and functions can always be layered on later.

As for debugging, it’s basically like “making a complaint to the AI,” Chan said with a laugh. If the error message changes, that’s usually a good sign; Artificial intelligence is working on the problem. He said that if the same mistake keeps recurring, he will reset the conversation and reframe the request with new examples.

And despite the occasional debugging, that said, jitter coding doesn’t require any. endless hours of grinding.

Chan is usually tinkering around, adding a feature or improving a function, after his kids have gone to bed. “It’s like we’re playing a game,” he said.

It accumulates over time and with a little guidance the pieces eventually come together.

Do you have a story to share about Vibe coding? Contact this reporter at: cmlee@businessinsider.com.

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