Vibe Coding: Embrace ‘Chat Coding’ Instead of Writing Code

Imagine having a brilliant app idea in your mind, but not knowing a single line of JavaScript. Last year, you would have had to either shelve your idea or empty your wallet to hire someone to develop it.

Now, you just need to open a chat window and describe your vision as if telling a friend about a dream: “I want a cat diary webpage that can upload photos, record moods, and has a fluffy texture for the background.” Minutes later, an interactive, clickable page appears before you. You can then say, “Change the button to pink and add a cat purring sound effect.” Seconds later, the changes are made. You never looked at a line of code; you simply directed based on your ‘vibe.’

This is the phenomenon known as Vibe Coding.

The concept of Vibe Coding was officially proposed by Andrej Karpathy, former AI director at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI, in early 2025. He described it on social media as: “There is a new way of programming that I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you are fully immersed in the feeling, embracing exponential growth, and even forgetting the existence of code.” This statement accurately captures the paradigm shift happening now: the focus of programming is shifting from how to write code to how to communicate requirements.

If traditional programming is like building a house brick by brick, Vibe Coding is sitting next to an architect, describing your ideal home while the construction team works rapidly before your eyes. You don’t need to know the type of cement or how to operate a crane; you just need to be clear about wanting a south-facing floor-to-ceiling window and a warm wood-colored living room. The implementation details of the code are all handled by large language models. Your ‘vibe’ and your intuition about whether the result is useful become the main characters in the creative process.

So, as an ordinary person who doesn’t understand code, how can you ride this wave and turn your ideas into usable software? You can start your Vibe Coding journey with these five steps.

Step 1: Choose a Handy ‘Magic Wand’

You need a tool that integrates AI conversation and real-time preview, eliminating the hassle of environment setup. For complete beginners, I recommend starting with browser-based platforms:

• Bolt AI builder: Websites, apps & prototypes: Type your requirements in the browser to generate full-stack applications and publish them online with one click.
• Replit Agent: Use dialogue on the Replit platform to have AI help you build projects from scratch.
• v0 by Vercel - Build Agents, Apps, and Websites with AI: Especially good at generating beautiful front-end web interfaces.

You don’t need to install anything; just a browser is enough to see your ideas instantly transformed into clickable pages.

Step 2: Learn to ‘Chat Precisely’ – Your Descriptive Power is Your Superpower

In Vibe Coding, the quality of the code depends on the clarity of your expression. Imagine AI as a highly capable but completely clueless intern; you need to ‘chat’ like this:

• Describe the end goal, not the steps: Saying “Create a time picker like the iOS alarm clock” is more effective than “Create a div and include the datepicker library.”
• Provide context and style references: “It should have a minimalist Nordic style, with colors inspired by Muji.”
• Break down large tasks: Instead of saying “Build me a Taobao,” start with “First, create a product display card.”
• Give feedback like you would to a designer: “Make this button a bit bigger; the color isn’t lively enough, try egg yolk yellow.” Through multiple rounds of dialogue, you will develop a sense of how to guide AI towards what you want.

Step 3: Start with ‘Imitation’ to Create

Don’t try to invent something entirely new right away. First, have AI replicate a simple product you are very familiar with, such as: “Create a search box like Google’s homepage that shows ‘Hello, Vibe’ after entering keywords.” Imitate a timer, a to-do list, or even a simple calculator. Through this ‘imitation,’ you will understand the AI’s working rhythm at a very low cost, and naturally, new ideas will emerge: “Can I add a little dog animation that urges me to complete my to-do list?” From here, you are already creating.

Step 4: Cultivate Your ‘Debugging Sense’ – Throw Errors Back

One of the most daunting aspects of traditional programming is facing a bunch of red error messages. In the world of Vibe Coding, you don’t need to be nervous. If the page crashes or a function fails, simply copy the error messages you don’t understand and give them to AI: “The page is broken, and it reported this error; please fix it and explain why in terms I can understand.” In most cases, AI will self-reflect and correct itself. If it still messes up, you can undo that step and describe your needs more specifically. What you need to use is not the technical skill of fixing bugs, but the intuition to judge whether the result feels right.

Step 5: Understand the ‘Can’ and ‘Cannot’ of Vibe Coding

This is crucial. Vibe Coding excels at quickly creating clickable prototypes, personal blogs, event invitation pages, internal tools, simple games, data dashboards, etc. It significantly lowers the barrier to realizing small ideas. However, if you aim to create a bank-level security system, a high-concurrency trading engine, or aerospace software, relying solely on ‘vibe’ conversations is still immature, as hidden deep logical vulnerabilities may go unnoticed – those fields still require the deep control of professional programmers. However, for the vast majority of people, being able to turn 80% of the ideas in your mind into usable software is an unprecedented creative liberation.

The essence of Vibe Coding is not to eliminate programmers but to return the right to ‘create software’ from a small group of code-savvy individuals to everyone with ideas and feelings. In the future, our starting point for learning programming may no longer be ‘variables and loops,’ but rather ‘how to clearly and structurally express your intentions.’