- Introduction
- Vibe Coding Is Real, Even If It Sounds Fake
- It Wasn’t Always Like This
- When the Vibes Are Good
- When the Vibes Go Sour
- Vibe Coding Isn’t a Threat — It’s a Tool
- Vibe On, But Don’t Forget to Refactor
It usually starts with a half-formed idea. Something you saw in a product, or a pain point you felt in your own workflow. You don’t open a design tool. You don’t write a spec. You barely even think in terms of “building” something yet — you’re just curious to see what happens if you nudge an idea into motion.
So you open ChatGPT, or Claude, or v0, or whatever your current favorite AI tool is, and you type something like: “Can you make a UI to manage content approvals with basic role-based permissions?”
A moment later, there’s code. A working layout. Maybe even styled buttons. You paste it into your dev environment, hit save, and… it just runs. It’s crude, maybe a little weird, but it does what you asked. You didn’t plan anything, you didn’t write a doc, and you’re not even sure what the app will look like when it’s done — but you’re vibing with it.
That’s vibe coding.
It’s not a methodology, not quite a workflow, and definitely not something you’ll find in a software engineering textbook. But it’s real. It’s the new way many developers — especially indie hackers, prototypers, and curious tinkerers — are building things in 2025. And it’s reshaping how software gets made.
Vibe Coding Is Real, Even If It Sounds Fake
The best way to describe vibe coding is that it’s software development driven more by intuition than by formal planning. It’s when you start building from a feeling rather than a roadmap. You’re not following a strict process; you’re exploring, playing, adjusting course as you go. It’s a bit like jazz — improvisational, loose, sometimes messy, but when it works, it feels effortless.
Vibe coding became viable when AI tools got fast, smart, and deeply integrated into development workflows. Instead of sketching out a rough wireframe, you now describe the app in a prompt. Instead of writing boilerplate from scratch, you delegate it to a code generator. Instead of navigating documentation, you ask the AI to walk you through it. You’re not necessarily writing less code — but you’re making fewer decisions up front. The architecture emerges as you build.
What’s striking about vibe coding is how it rewires your relationship to momentum. Traditional development starts with setup. You plan first — routes, schemas, component trees — then begin to implement. Vibe coding flips this. You implement first, then refactor. You move fast not because you’re cutting corners, but because the corners don’t even exist yet. You’re inside the sketch of a sketch, discovering the edges of your idea by bumping into them.
It Wasn’t Always Like This
Just a few years ago, this style of building would’ve been impractical, if not impossible. Starting a new app meant setting up boilerplate, configuring packages, writing your own skeletons for things like routing, state management, and user auth. Prototyping something even halfway polished took days, not minutes.
But now, with LLMs capable of generating full React components from a sentence, and tools like Vercel’s v0 turning prompts directly into deployable frontends, the distance between “idea” and “implementation” has shrunk to almost nothing. You don’t need to create a new repo or choose between Tailwind and MUI. You just tell the machine what you want and start massaging what it gives you. The scaffolding appears instantly. The vibe takes over.
And it’s not just the generation of code that makes this possible. It’s the way these tools let you skip so many intermediate steps. You don’t have to deeply understand a library’s API before you use it — you can copy-paste an AI-written snippet and see what happens. You don’t need to define your data models upfront — you just create the UI and stub in the data as you go. You’re not optimizing for correctness. You’re optimizing for flow.
When the Vibes Are Good
The surprising part is how productive vibe coding can be — especially for early-stage projects. If you’re building a dashboard, a form, a search UI, an internal tool, or even a lightweight SaaS MVP, vibe coding gets you to “working” faster than almost anything else. You’re skipping over the usual slog of setup and jumping straight into shaping behavior.
This is particularly magical when you’re exploring an idea you’re not entirely sure about. Maybe you’re trying to visualize some data in a new way, or rethinking how people create playlists, or inventing a better way to manage personal todos. Vibe coding lets you build just enough to see the shape of the idea — and often, that’s all you need to realize whether it’s worth pursuing.
And there’s a creative joy to it, too. You’re not worrying about lint rules or folder structure. You’re not obsessing over test coverage. You’re just making stuff. You’re letting the code guide you, surprising yourself with what emerges. It feels less like engineering and more like sketching in code.
When the Vibes Go Sour
Of course, there are limits. Vibe coding is a great way to explore an idea — it’s a terrible way to scale one.
Eventually, entropy catches up with you. You realize your component tree is a rat’s nest. Your API calls are duplicated across three files. Your state is a mess of derived variables and hand-rolled context providers. The AI gave you what you asked for — and now you’re stuck figuring out what it gave you.
One of the weird ironies of vibe coding is that while it feels easier, it often makes maintenance harder. The lack of structure that made things fast to start now becomes a burden. Refactoring AI-generated code is like renovating a house with no blueprint. You can do it — but you’ll wish you’d laid a better foundation.
This is where experienced developers still shine. Vibe coding gives you a sketch, but turning it into something sustainable still requires taste, judgment, and craft. You have to know when to stop vibing and start engineering.
This is also where the purpose-built AI Agents come in, which are the perfect inbetween, requiring more experience to use but resulting in cleaner code overall. Check out our blog post about Purpose-Built AI Agents.
Vibe Coding Isn’t a Threat — It’s a Tool
Some developers see vibe coding and worry that it’s “lazy” or “bad practice.” But that misses the point. It’s not a replacement for thoughtful design — it’s a complement to it. A way to move quickly when you need speed, not structure. A way to build your way into clarity.
It’s not for everything. If you’re writing infrastructure, building a critical backend service, or scaling a large team, you probably don’t want to vibe code your way through it. But for personal projects, rapid experiments, and even internal tools, it’s an incredibly effective way to get to working software.
And over time, as AI tools improve, the line between vibe coding and traditional development will blur. What starts as a loose sketch might become the seed of a more rigorous system. What begins as a half-baked idea might harden into a real product. The key is knowing how to transition — when to embrace the vibes, and when to tighten the reins.
Vibe On, But Don’t Forget to Refactor
At its best, vibe coding makes development feel light again. It brings back the playful, exploratory spirit that many of us fell in love with in the first place — when coding felt like creativity, not just implementation. You get to chase ideas, skip the drudgery, and see what happens when you let instinct lead.
But it’s not magic. It’s not a license to ship garbage. It’s a tool. A sketchpad. A way to move fast — with the understanding that, eventually, you’ll need to slow down and do the work of shaping it into something real.
So vibe code. Let the tools do their thing. Explore the weird corners of your imagination. Build things you don’t understand yet. But when it’s time to go from sketch to structure — make sure you show up as an engineer.
That’s the real vibe.