What Is Vibe Coding, Actually? (And What Even Is an App?)
What an app is, what vibe coding is, and where to actually start. Plain answers for the curious person who doesn't know where to start.
I thought it was stupid.
When a client first mentioned vibe coding to me, I did what any self-respecting web designer with years of experience does.
I rolled my eyes.
I had seen it floating around social media. The posts promising anyone could build an app now, no code required, just vibes and prompts. I found it annoying. I found it reductive. And honestly, I was offended by it, because I knew developers. Real ones. People who had spent years learning something genuinely hard and genuinely valuable, and this whole category of content felt like it was waving that away.
As Dumbledore and Hermione say, "Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself".
I think that is what I was doing. I did not want to say the word. I did not want to engage with it. I gave it no oxygen and ignored it for about two years.
Just like everything I say I will “never” do…
At some point, I allowed myself to get curious and look at why I “never” wanted to do it and then usually diving in.
I stopped rejecting vibe coding as ridiculous, and instead started learning and understanding what I could actually do with it.
I started looking at my actual work life. The intake process I was doing manually. The estimates I was rebuilding from scratch every time. The project management that lived across four different tools and a notes app and multiple very chaotic spreadsheets.
I thought about what I do on repeat. What I was doing analog that could live somewhere permanent. What would be more streamlined if it existed as one thing instead of many scattered things.
That is when something shifted. Not because vibe coding suddenly seemed cool. Because I realized I did not even understand what I was asking. I had two questions I had never actually answered. What is an app? And what is vibe coding? Once I went looking for plain answers to both of those, everything clicked.
So what is an app, actually
I am not sure most people have a working definition. I definitely did not either, when I started out. I knew what an app was in the App Store sense. Something you download. Something with a logo, a rating and probably a subscription tier or a free trial.
That is one kind of app. It is not the only kind.
An app is a digital tool. A portal. A hub. It is a thing that lives online and does a specific job, repeatedly, without you having to rebuild it every time. That is it.
It does not have to connect to Stripe. It does not have to have a login system and a waitlist and a launch strategy. It can just be a thing that solves a problem you have, that you made, that works the way you actually work.
Once I understood that, I started seeing problems differently. Not as things to manage manually forever, but as things that could just live somewhere and do their job.
And what is vibe coding
Vibe coding is how you build that thing without knowing how to write code.
You describe what you want in plain language. The AI builds it. You look at what it made, tell it what to change, and it changes it. You keep going until it works the way you need it to. No syntax. No Stack Overflow. No waiting on a developer’s availability or budget.
You prompt, it builds, you iterate. That is the mechanic.
The tool I have been using is Base44. It is not the only software out there though. There are plenty of others and the process is roughly the same across all of them: You are having a conversation with something that can write code, and the output of that conversation is a working thing.
It is not magic. It does still require you to know what problem you are solving. It does still require patience and a willingness to be wrong about what you thought you wanted. But the barrier that used to require a developer for every small internal problem is not at all what it has been our entire lives.
What I actually built
This is the part where I went full Miss Frizzle. I got on the bus. I took chances. I made mistakes. I got messy. I made things that did not work and then made them work and then rebuilt them entirely because I understood more than I did the first time.
A client intake flow. A project portal with an astrology feature baked in because I wanted one and I could. An analog budgeting tool. A digital bullet journal. A scheduling flow. Things that are mine, that work the way I think, that I customized because the tools that existed did not quite fit.
I also recently moved my entire website from a traditional host to a vibe coded platform. Having backend functions, an admin dashboard, a real client flow, more control over what the site can actually do. That has been a different category of useful than I expected.
None of this required a developer. It required me being willing to try something I had already decided was not for me. And then being willing to learn while I was in it, not just prompt and hope.
A note before you go build something
Vibe coding is an entry point. That is what it is. It is not the whole field.
Software engineering is a real discipline with depth I am still only beginning to understand. Developers and engineers know things I will never fully know, and I mean that without any performance of humility. There is architecture and logic and theory underneath everything I am building that people have spent careers learning. That matters. That deserves respect.
What I want for you is to get curious and stay curious. Learn what an app actually is. Learn what is happening when you prompt something into existence. Ask why it works. Ask what broke and why. You may never get a computer science degree and that is fine. But you can learn enough foundational knowledge to build real tools that solve real problems, for yourself or for others, that you otherwise would never have had access to.
Get on the bus. Go see what is back there. Just do not pretend you built the bus.
What I want you to take from this
I very much still think we need developers. I am for the developers of this world and have more respect and admiration for them than I could ever put into words.
But for a solopreneur who does not have a developer in their pocket and cannot afford one for every small internal problem? This is a different conversation.
The question is not whether you can build an app.
The question is what problem you keep solving the same way, over and over, that could just live somewhere and do that job for you.
Start there.
The next paid post goes deeper on all of this. How to actually take an idea from your head into something built and working. Stay tuned for that one.
Love this: As Dumbledore and Hermione say, "Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. “