New trend of building “internal vibe-coding apps” at tech companies

A quiet trend is spreading through bigger tech companies: they’re building their own internal vibe-coding tools instead of only buying them from vendors. Ramp has one called Glass. Stripe has Harbor. Both are meant for non-engineers to build internal apps and prototypes without waiting on a traditional software team.

Ramp’s version started as an internal tool for creating complex apps that run inside the company. People can share what they make, let others use it, and even modify it. One example the team showed was a marketing-built CRM with more than 50 fields and filters on screen. That kind of thing can look unwieldy fast, but the point is that someone outside engineering could still assemble it.

Stripe’s Harbor took a different path, but the motive was similar. The company said the tool was built by a single engineer in about six weeks, and Stripe described it as an AI-assisted prototyping tool. Ramp’s Glass, by contrast, involved two engineers and now goes all the way into new-hire onboarding. That tells you something about how useful these tools can be once a company really leans on them.

Why not just use Lovable, Replit, Retool, or another vendor? The companies building their own say the answer is mostly control. Internal tools can connect to internal data more safely, follow house design rules, and get tailored to company needs without a long vendor dance over compliance and pricing. They also train engineers on AI infrastructure, which matters when people with that experience are hard to hire. Ramp has even turned Glass into an external product now, calling it an AI workspace where knowledge compounds. That’s a very corporate sentence, but the underlying idea is simple: if the internal tool is good enough, someone will inevitably try to sell it.