Vibecoding: a beginner's guide

My first vibecoded mini-website, thanks to Cursor: obviously it's a lottery number generator!

I'd asked for something "colourful and fun" ... phew. Lesson learned: specify individual colour rgb codes next time!

As for the actual functionality though, I'm happy. It created a working prototype from a single prompt (complete with spinning number animations while the draw is taking place and a celebration effect at the end), and before I knew it I was just working through a couple versions and asking the AI to change this and that and ... Cursor makes it dead easy because it just applies the edits and you refresh the webpage to see what havoc you've caused.

View attachment 1881016
Ok, so my site is so glorious I just had to host it on Google Sites for your viewing pleasure: https://sites.google.com/view/foxhound5366slottogenerator/home

If any of you actually win the lottery with this, you know how to find me :)
 
No.

Vibe coding was not coined by OpenAi.

I will give credit to Karpathy, but I don't think he came up with it. He said it out loud though, and established it, or in my opinion made it mainstream in 2025. He took ownership, and I have seen this happen timeously in business. The term "vibe coding" did get to be promotionally used by OpenAI. They, however, didn't get to coin "AI Pair Programming", that was GitHub (using Codex). OpenAI did make their DevDay 2025 about vibe coding. Public sentiment has since made them reconsider how to navigate the negativity. Vibe coding implies that anyone could potentially be a developer. It hasn't stopped them, and others, using it in their marketing language. I will stick to what I said, the term "vibe coding" was vibing around OpenAI. I mean, how much time was there between Karpathy leaving OpenAI and posting that on X?

Vibe coding is literally someone just letting the AI build the whole thing and who cares what the code looks like. As long as it works. Whatever.

This largely depends on its vehicle. Many don't see it like that. I will tell you now that there are people who are vibe coding, who will tell you that they are being AI assisted.

Theo has it well summarised in this video:


Yes, I am aware, there are people who don't like Theo.

Assisted AI coding is getting agents to help with very specific areas of development and not make all the decisions.

Each with their own thought, and these philosophies will take more shape as time progresses. I am a traditionalist, so I understand the dissidence, but I am aware where to accept improvements. More work, less time.

Not AI in coding, but AI still get things wrong. I am not a programmer, I am a layman.

Vibe coding is fine for small simple apps and non critical things. But if you want robust, production grade software - you don’t vibe code it in a day. You get developers to build it - who may or may not use AI assistance.

Yes, I agree.

Just see what Karpathy said recently:


I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

Then in response to an LLM (Opus 4.5) being good:

It’s very good. People who aren’t keeping up even over the last 30 days already have a deprecated world view on this topic.

This one:


Q: Do you feel these skills are substantial and transferrable to the future? Does someone who started 1-2 years ago have an advantage over someone who started a month ago? Will lessons today be useful 1-2 years ago? I feel like the "missing out" factor is still quite low.

A: Very good questions imo experienced devs have a real advantage but only if they rapidly progress through their grief cycle and adapt, now and onwards. Categorically rejecting or ignoring the new layer would be a mistake.

What is this now, vibe coding or AI-assisted programming? There are solutions being built to hold and operate these layers.

There are many more examples that I can pick on.

This isn't limited to coding/programming. I see this in ITIL, all reporting, documentation, etc. There are people who have the experience, but who are not reviewing and assessing the outputs. There is this rush to cut time. More and more tools that I am using are becoming guided with agentic implementations, and more times than not it behaviourly adds time.

Anyhow, this is as much as I will add to the topic. Someone wants to build a WordPress site.
 
Last edited:
To me vibe coding is someone who has no clue how the code works and more than likely never even sees it. Why the word coding is even in there I don’t know.

AI-assisted coding is an entirely different thing use by a professional who knows what’s potting AND more importantly sees and understands what the AI is doing.

I will say this, going by your understanding. People who start out with vibe coding, and who don't want to learn what they are doing, will be deemed incompetent. With that, I agree.

I use vibe coding to explore, getting to understand problems, analysing how what can be observed behaves in code. For WordPress, and other tools, I do use it to look up APIs, that helps a lot. For microcontrollers, it helps to understand the libraries and how components and modules interact with those libraries. Everything that I have vibed was a prototype, conceptualising.

It also showed me how vulnerable CS2 is to cheating. Sad, really.
 
Last edited:
lovable.dev does a pretty decent job most of the times on first run.
Hey, Cursor comes more highly-recommended, but I did get a Lovable mention when I was researching this. What I’m most surprised by in my little website above is how it’s mobile-optimised. I didn’t even ask for that, and the components flow on mobile like a charm.

Have you built anything that surprised you in Lovable?
 
Hey, Cursor comes more highly-recommended, but I did get a Lovable mention when I was researching this. What I’m most surprised by in my little website above is how it’s mobile-optimised. I didn’t even ask for that, and the components flow on mobile like a charm.

Have you built anything that surprised you in Lovable?
I don’t personally use it. A mate of mine used it to build his own website and it did a pretty decent job. I then just had a quick play with it creating a few basic one pagers. The results weren't bad. It's quite amazing what they can spit out in a matter of seconds.

It all comes down to the prompts. If you get those right, the tools tend to do a much better job on the first run.

I personally use Kiro with proper steering, hooks,specs etc, set up. Out of the box, some models seem to have a mind of their own, and without clear direction I’ve found they can produce subpar code.

That said, I’ve been pretty happy with Kiro, especially the CLI version. it’s blazingly fast.
 
I vibe coded an attendance system, pay calculations, record keeping and also linked a GIS mapping system to it for a non profit.

The code is all SQL and Java Script, neither of which I have any extensive knowledge of and would have taken me significantly longer without AI assistance. I used Appsmith for the UI, hence the Java Script, if they offered Python I would have happily used that
 
You vibecoded yourself a spinbot, or what?

No, and yes, but I wanted to understand a problem, and monitor that problem over time. I used vibe coding to gain insight, and 'aggressively' analyse existing cheats. Fascinating. No, I am not putting any account at risk, nor am I the type to spoil any rule-abiding player's experience. Integrity matters. That is all there is to it.
 
I will say this, going by your understanding. People who start out with vibe coding, and who don't want to learn what they are doing, will be deemed incompetent. With that, I agree.

I use vibe coding to explore, getting to understand problems, analysing how what can be observed behaves in code. For WordPress, and other tools, I do use it to look up APIs, that helps a lot. For microcontrollers, it helps to understand the libraries and how components and modules interact with those libraries. Everything that I have vibed was a prototype, conceptualising.

It also showed me how vulnerable CS2 is to cheating. Sad, really.

But you have coding experience and therefore perspective.

Entirely different story for someone who superficially approaches this and doesn’t understand the underlying code, but worse still doesn’t have any care in the world to ever understand it.

Your entire approach is that of wanting to understand how it works under the hood, whereas the vibe coders are only after the end result.
 
Last edited:
I basically vibe coded an alpha version of a product for a customer :X3:. Even though I am very experienced when it comes to React, I really didn't pay much attention to the code whilst I was getting the thing to work. Basically appearance, and console output were my control levers.

They actually really appreciated it, as I gave them something that was 90% working within a month of kickoff. I then spent the rest of the time tidying it up and cleaning it up.
 
I basically vibe coded an alpha version of a product for a customer :X3:. Even though I am very experienced when it comes to React, I really didn't pay much attention to the code whilst I was getting the thing to work. Basically appearance, and console output were my control levers.

They actually really appreciated it, as I gave them something that was 90% working within a month of kickoff. I then spent the rest of the time tidying it up and cleaning it up.
I hope you are adding all your security checks or only using this as an internal project that doesn't touch the internet.

The vibe coded things are coming through in pentests and have huge security flaws.

Even programs that have been pentested aren’t safe. Someone decides to “clean up” the code, dumps it into an AI without any of the context, and the AI strips out chunks that existed for a reason. Suddenly, an application that’s been tested for a decade is vulnerable to XSS, SQL injection, etc.
 
I hope you are adding all your security checks or only using this as an internal project that doesn't touch the internet.

The vibe coded things are coming through in pentests and have huge security flaws.

Even programs that have been pentested aren’t safe. Someone decides to “clean up” the code, dumps it into an AI without any of the context, and the AI strips out chunks that existed for a reason. Suddenly, an application that’s been tested for a decade is vulnerable to XSS, SQL injection, etc.

The other problem is of course now you do a concept and smash it together in a day and show them how it works.

Now you want to charge them for three months work to sort out the back ends and they can’t understand why because you already showed them a working thing.

And then they end up at the next guy who only does vibe coding and none of the security, but for a third of the price.
 
But you have coding experience and therefore perspective.

Entirely different story for someone who superficially approaches this and doesn’t understand the underlying code, but worse still doesn’t have any care in the world to ever understand it.

Your entire approach is that of wanting to understand how it works under the hood, whereas the vibe coders are only after the end result.
I can agree. The "builder" community has become intoxicated with vibe coders. There is a double standard though, people who use AI in coding who speak out against it. Clout mining is a bane.

Personally I don't think anyone should disclose their AI use. Merit remains key, and your reputation does the talking.
 
The other problem is of course now you do a concept and smash it together in a day and show them how it works.

Now you want to charge them for three months work to sort out the back ends and they can’t understand why because you already showed them a working thing.

And then they end up at the next guy who only does vibe coding and none of the security, but for a third of the price.
I dont know much about that side but it makes sense.

I get it I have had to work with excel spreadsheets that had 1000s of lines and numerous pages. I can program somewhat - decent in most languages but learning all the syntax to pull stuff from excel and get it all working or going through all that data would take a long time.

I vibe coded it in an afternoon where I push a button and viola all the data is processed. For my personal use lekker, I am sure there are plenty of flaws but no harm, when the same thing is going into prod its a different story.
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X