How Vibe Coding AI Puts Digital Creation in Everyone’s Hands
In an era where digital creation had heretofore been reserved for specialized coders, Vibe Coding AI now allows anyone to create functional websites and/or apps simply by describing desired emotional qualities and user experiences. What follows is my journey creating a working app through nothing more than descriptive prompts, and my reflections on whether this democratization opens new doors or closes others.
“How Vibe Coding AI Puts Digital Creation in Everyone’s Hands” Podcast
For the record, while I know some basic WordPress programming, I’m far from a programmer. I have no problem telling you about which functionality is best for a site or how to simplify the customer journey throughout a digital experience. However, as you’ll see later in this post, this is about to change. In as little as 20 minutes (not counting the two hours it took me to figure a few things out), I was able to build a fully functional and deployable “Dinner Journal” mobile app that allows me to document and plan my weekly dinner menus, source recipes (e.g., cookbook, Instagram, or other), rate the meals, and generate a shopping list for the week’s dinners.
The Rise of AI-Powered Creation
Large language model (LLM) platforms are transforming digital creation. Claude 3.7 Sonnet—widely recognized as a pioneering hybrid reasoning model—and Claude Code for agentic coding are making it remarkably easy for anyone to create digital products; if you can express what you want your website, landing page or app to do, how it should act and the emotional connection it should make with end-users, you can now bring it to life, regardless of your technical background or lack thereof.
This democratization of digital creation through AI is being rapidly deployed and defined as “Vibe Coding.” The term was recently coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI who later left to form Eureka Labs.
As Mr. Karpathy explained on X: “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”
For example, when developing the prompt for my Dinner Journal app, I directed Claude 3.7 Sonnet to convey emotional attributes of being friendly, intuitive and conversational. When using AI to build similar digital products, as long as you can describe what you’re looking to build, what it should solve for and what emotions it should evoke, anyone from any industry can create something that’s more than just average. The deeper and more provocative descriptions and parameters you task Vibe Coding AI with really does generate an endless amount of results.
What Makes Vibe Coding Different?
From Mr. Karpathy’s initial description, the concept of vibe coding has evolved to encompass specific characteristics that focus on user experience design and emotional design principles:
Aesthetic focus: Vibe coding emphasizes visual appeal through consistent formatting, thoughtful naming conventions and harmonious structure.
Emotional resonance: Code is written to evoke specific feelings or moods, often reflected in variable names, comments and overall architecture.
Developer experience: There’s a strong focus on creating code that feels satisfying to work with, including intuitive interfaces and pleasant workflows.
Thematic consistency: Projects often have cohesive themes that inform design decisions throughout the codebase.
This approach mirrors how architects design buildings not just for structural integrity, but also for how they make people feel when inside them. The digital experience isn’t just solving a problem; it’s creating an atmosphere or emotional context. The AI, without being asked, ensures it creates a mobile-first experience, or if it’s for a website rather than an app, it knows that it needs to incorporate a responsive design.
In my brand strategy work, I use this approach rigorously when starting a project: First and foremost, I ask the client to express what their brand or new website should convey. This relates directly to my earlier post, “Using Metaphors to Decipher Corporate Strategy,” which explored how visual metaphors can serve as powerful tools for leaders to convey the essence of their company’s vision and values, transcending the limitations of conventional corporate language. The philosophy behind vibe coding is similar—just focused on different outputs.
Vibe Coding Versus AI-Assisted Coding
It’s important to note the difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted coding. Vibe coding is about expressing what you want to create in terms of emotions, feelings and experiences. Someone with no coding knowledge can create complete digital experiences by focusing solely on the emotional and experiential outcomes they want to achieve. This represents a true no-code development approach that centers on the user experience. On the other hand, AI-assisted coding enhances your technical writing code process rather than replacing it entirely. The AI provides suggestions and improvements while you maintain control of the technical aspects.
I recently used AI-assisted coding to expedite technical workflows for an AI Chatbot that I deployed throughout my site, I used AI assistance to help structure and develop unique workflows based on specific sections of my site that encourage lead generation and direct visitors to the right case study or content.
Vibe Coding My App
To take the philosophy behind vibe coding and see how someone with no real coding knowledge like myself can create complete digital experiences, it was time for me to see first-hand how easy or challenging this would be. After two hours or so, I had figured out which actual coding program I wanted to use, connected it to a platform where the app I was creating could be viewed, and created something clickable with a decent amount of content to test my idea. (Note: I didn’t build out the functionality of each page; just the framework.) For most people who have no coding skills, the most time-consuming aspects are understanding the prompts and which platforms to use next; these can be a little hard to grasp. However, I even used AI to help with this, and it shared how-to videos and articles about the specific areas that I had questions about.
The first step was putting together the right structured prompt that articulated my vision, which I could then bring into Bolt, an AI-powered code generation platform that translated this prompt into working code in under 20 seconds. The screenshots below represent the functionality and feature requirements that Claude 3.7 Sonnet generated based on the input I provided. You can see how the AI segmented core functionality, user experience requirements, technical considerations and design priorities. It took Claude just a few seconds to create a final prompt based on several refinements.
I then copied and pasted the prompt into Bolt, which generated the code in less than 10 seconds. Next, I deployed it to Expo, which is used to create, review and deploy native apps.
From there, I was able to go back to Bolt and ask it to modify the code to, let’s say, change a font or image, and the updates were then automatically reflected in the deployed version. While the results far exceeded my expectations and I can see how this can add value for me and my clients, I also saw how it can potentially eliminate the need for a good percentage of designers, coders, writers and visual artists.
Is AI Opening New Doors or Closing Others?
This is the question I’ve been asking myself. Whether you’re a marketer looking to prototype ideas, an entrepreneur—or anyone for that matter—who’s looking to build your digital product, vibe coding and AI-assisted coding without a doubt represent a fundamental shift that provides anyone and everyone with the chance to learn and participate in digital creation.
This also means that very soon (if it’s not already happening), jobs and roles will be eliminated because of AI. I see both the good—like how you can use it to expand on an endless amount of research or to bounce ideas off of your coworkers—and the bad— e.g., how certain specialized skillsets will no longer be required within all business sectors. Take, for example, smaller businesses where strategy, branding and the customer journey may not be a priority, but having a simple, cost-effective website that says what their business does is. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if self-service website platforms, like Wix or Canva, begin to offer a form of vibe coding to customers within the year.
I will continue to explore how these platforms can add value for me and my clients. I’ve always believed that it’s better to be at least with the curve rather than behind it—especially when that curve will always require a human touch.
Feel free to reach out to me here to discuss how emotional design principles—aka vibe coding—can transform your next digital project. As always, thank you for reading or listening.
As always, thank you for reading or listening. Questions? Feel free to email me here.
