What Is Vibe Coding? Meaning, How to Start, Limits [2026]

vibe coding — what it means

Vibe coding is a software development method in which you give an AI instructions in natural language and proceed with development without reading the generated code line by line.

Hi, I’m Masato — I came up as a Webflow specialist and I now spend my days chasing the leading edge of AI. I run Webharu, a web production company in Shiogama, Miyagi, Japan.

You have probably been seeing the phrase “vibe coding” more and more. Less than a year after it appeared in February 2025, it had spread far enough to be named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025. The term has run ahead of the substance, though, and I often see it misread as “leave it to AI and a whole site or app builds itself.” In reality, how you should approach it changes considerably between using it as a hobby and using it in a business.

Almost all of my day-to-day work — client website production and building our own site alike — runs on vibe coding. In this article, as someone who genuinely uses it every day, I will cover the meaning and origin, the difference from no-code, what you can actually build, how to start and what makes it work, and an honest account of the limits.

Let me start with the conclusion.

Vibe coding is a development method in which you give an AI instructions in natural language and move forward without reading the generated code line by line. For personal hobby projects or small tools, that “hand it over without reading it” approach works perfectly well.

Production sites and apps used in a business are a different story. You can hand the typing to the AI, but deciding what to build, checking the facts, and taking responsibility remain human work. Whether you understand that division — the human judges, the AI does the work — changes the outcome enormously. That is my conclusion as someone who actually does this job with this method.

What vibe coding is: meaning and origin

Vibe coding is a method of development in which you give an AI instructions in natural language and proceed on the “vibe” without reading the generated code closely.

What the word “vibe” is pointing at

“Vibe” originally means atmosphere or mood in English. Rather than understanding and writing every line of code, you rely on the sense that emerges through dialogue with the AI — “this direction seems about right” — and that is where the name comes from. The casual ring of “about right” makes it sound lightweight, but once you know the origin, the contrast with the traditional style of development, where you read code strictly, becomes clear.

It was coined by Andrej Karpathy

The first person to use the phrase was Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher, formerly head of AI at Tesla and one of the founding members of OpenAI. In February 2025, he posted on X (formerly Twitter) to the effect that “there’s a new kind of coding where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists” — that post is regarded as the origin. It described Karpathy’s own development style: sitting in front of a programming editor and writing code while accepting the AI’s suggestions almost as they come (the official Collins Dictionary blog). The very fact that someone at the front line of AI research announced “I’m not looking at the code any more” made a strong impact on the developer community at the time.

Chosen as Word of the Year 2025

Less than a year after it appeared, the phrase was named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025 (announced in November 2025). Collins defines it, in essence, as using natural language to make an AI write code. The shortlist also included words such as “biohacking” — deliberately modifying and optimizing your own mind and body — but vibe coding was the one chosen in the end (CNN). One coinage spreading this fast is, I think, proof of how quickly the experience of instructing an AI to write code reached people far beyond professional developers.

The hobby usage and what it actually means on a professional site

What matters here is that the word is used with some latitude. In hobby and personal-development contexts, it is mostly used with Karpathy’s original nuance: leave it entirely to the AI without reading a single line of code. On sites like ours, where the method is used for paid work, the meaning shifts a little.

The style is the same — you instruct the AI in natural language and you do not hand-type each implementation. But we always insert a step where a human checks the code and design that comes out and verifies the facts, the security, and the quality. Not “hand it over without reading it,” but “hand over the typing, then look and judge.” That is what vibe coding actually is when used for work. Take it that the same single word carries completely different cautions in a hobby context and in a work context.

Behind it all is the evolution of AI agents

There is a timing reason why Karpathy’s post drew such a large response in 2025. Around exactly the same period, AI was evolving from “autocomplete,” returning a single suggested line of code, into “coding agents” that autonomously read and write implementations spanning multiple files and then fix their own work while watching the results run.

You give an instruction, the AI carries several pieces of work forward on its own, you look at the result and give the next instruction. Only once that exchange started running at a practical speed did “proceed without reading the code line by line” become a realistic option.

How vibe coding differs from no-code

The terms most often confused with vibe coding are no-code and low-code. Because we do both Webflow (no-code) and AI website production (vibe coding), we get asked about this difference a lot. They look similar, but the mechanisms are different things.

No-code: combining parts that were prepared in advance

A no-code tool like Webflow works by dragging & dropping design parts and functional blocks that were prepared in advance and combining them on screen. The code running underneath was built and verified beforehand by the tool’s vendor, so behavior tends to be stable.

Vibe coding: the AI generates the code on the spot

Vibe coding, by contrast, has the AI generate brand-new code on the spot, specific to that project. Because it is not a combination of predetermined parts, freedom is higher — but what gets generated differs every time. That is exactly why a human checking and reviewing step is indispensable.

The difference from full-scratch development

The other point of comparison is conventional “full-scratch development,” where humans write code from zero without AI. The degree of freedom is the same as vibe coding, but because the implementation itself consumes human working hours, the timeline and cost tend to be large. It is easiest to think of vibe coding as a method that keeps the freedom full-scratch development had while compressing only the time the implementation takes.

In our case, we choose by the nature of the project: no-code for work where set features need to take shape quickly and stably, and AI website production by vibe coding for work where we want to build freely from zero. A real example of using a vibe-coding-style approach on Webflow is written up in our article on Webflow × vibe coding.

What you can actually build with vibe coding

Because the phrase itself is so striking, I imagine what you really want to know is what it can actually do. The uses range from static websites such as landing pages and corporate sites to small tools for improving internal operations, all the way to smartphone apps. The scale covers both ends too — from a simple tool an individual builds over a weekend to a production site published externally as a business.

From here on, this is my own experience.

26 pages of our own site built in 7 days

We fully rebuilt our own site in July 2026 by vibe coding with AI (Claude Code). Twenty-six pages built from scratch, 62 articles and 24 case studies migrated from the old site, four contact forms connected, and analytics and structured data put in place — all finished in 7 days (4 days of planning, 3 days of building). The AI did the work; the human (me, alone) decided the concept and structure, made the aesthetic judgments on design, checked the facts and the sales judgment in the copy, and reviewed and gave the go-ahead at each stage. The detailed record is all in our log of the 7-day rebuild of our own site.

Planning and developing iOS apps

It is not only websites: we have planned and developed two iOS apps in-house and taken both through to release on the App Store. As with website production, most of the implementation proceeds through dialogue with AI. Unlike website production, an app goes through a third-party check in the form of store review, which makes the preparation and verification beforehand even more important.

A time-and-attendance app with Figma Make

There is a browser-only example too. The details are collected in our article on building a time-and-attendance app with Figma Make. It is one example that the method itself holds up even without using a terminal the way a coding agent does.

How to do vibe coding: 3 steps to get started

From here on, the procedure is for people who actually want to start. Do not overthink it — the following three steps are enough.

Step 1: Choose a tool

There are broadly two kinds of tool.

Type	Representative tools	Who it suits
Coding agent type	Claude Code and similar	People who don’t mind working in a terminal and want to do serious development
Browser-only type	Figma Make and similar	People with no programming experience who want to try it first

I mainly use Claude Code myself (switching between the Opus and Fable models), and the monthly bill is around ¥30,000. Both types usually come with a free tier, so rather than committing to one straight away, be casual about it: try two or three, then pick whichever gives you the best feel for building through conversation.

Step 2: Build small

Do not try to build a production corporate site or an internal system from the start. If you begin with something that stands alone as a single feature — a one-page site that works as a business card, a simple internal tallying tool — you will pick up both the feel of the dialogue with the AI and how to fix things when they go wrong far faster.

Step 3: Run it and fix it

The essence of vibe coding is not finishing in one pass, but repeating the cycle of running it, looking at it, and fixing it. Give an instruction, run it, tell it what bothers you, run it again — that back-and-forth is the basic motion. Think of it as close to giving work to a new member of staff and giving feedback while looking at what they produce, and it becomes much easier to start without tensing up.

The first step is “your own site” and “your own app”

For anyone wondering what to start with, my recommendation is clear. First build your own site, then build your own app. Not for someone else — build your own thing. That is the fastest route.

Let me write one harsh thing. It does cost money, and if you intend to get through all of this with a study budget of zero, I will go as far as to say you are better off not taking it on. If you cannot spend anywhere from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of yen a month on tools, you will not reach the point of making it your job at all.

That said, there are options for keeping the cost down. Lately Chinese-made AI is said to be quite good — very cheap, and reasonably capable. Trying there first is a perfectly valid move. And, interestingly, once you can build with Chinese AI, you start getting matched with people who want their work built with Chinese AI, and you win projects that way. Your choice of tool becomes, directly, a doorway to work.

Tips that make it work

Having gone round this loop many times, here are five tips I have learned that make it work.

Give clear instructions

With a vague instruction like “make it nice,” the AI can only return something equally vague. Instead of “make the site look cool,” put into words who it is for and what to prioritize — “for company owners in their thirties; use calm colors to convey trust; make the track record stand out” — and what comes back will be much closer to what you expect.

Don’t expect perfection in one pass

The first generation almost never becomes the finished article as-is. Just as with an exchange between people, you will finish faster overall if you go in expecting to see a rough first draft and then correct course.

Have the courage to throw things away

To be honest, the design of our own site did not fall into place immediately either. We produced around 50 variations and narrowed them down, and for the month or so before we could reliably generate good design, I was mass-producing garbage with AI. Being willing to throw away the “that isn’t what I meant” results and redo them again and again is, I think, actually the single most important knack in vibe coding.

Break instructions into small pieces

An oversized instruction like “build the whole site at once” makes it hard for the human side to grasp what is happening along the way. Splitting instructions by page and by feature, checking that each one works before moving on, looks like the long way round but is faster in the end — and much easier to correct.

Get eyes other than your own on it

When you are absorbed in dialogue with an AI, your field of view narrows without your noticing. Look at it again after sleeping on it, and if possible have someone else look at the screen too — put at least one pair of eyes on it from outside the conversation. In our case, on top of internal checks, we always build a final pre-launch check into the process as a formal step.

The limits and cautions (honestly)

Here, as a production company, I will write honestly rather than only telling the convenient half of the story.

The things I threw away | the CMS, the booking form, the no-code tool — all of it became garbage

Let me start with my own failures. There is plenty that worked and still could not be shipped, and had to be rebuilt.

Before the current models arrived, I spent a long stretch developing all sorts of things. A CMS, a booking form, a no-code tool — I tried to build them myself. The result was that all of it became garbage, and I deleted it. Honestly, you could say that time was wasted.

The rebuild of our own site is the same. Before it went well this time, I had made roughly four attempts, and none of them worked. The truth is that everything moved at once only thanks to the current model.

So, put provocatively, it is “a site built in 7 days.” But if you open the lid, counting from back when AI was not yet very smart, it took about six months — that is the accurate version. If you look at the number 7 and decide “I could do that too,” you will probably end up throwing work away a few times, just as I did.

And it still isn’t finished

One more honest note: there are still pages on this site of ours that I have not been able to inspect myself, and plenty of pages I still want to publish. It is not in a state I would call finished.

I think this is an intrinsic property of vibe coding. Precisely because AI made everything possible, the finish line moved further away. When the volume you can build goes up, the things you want to do go up by the same amount. If you think “using AI means finishing sooner,” that expectation will be betrayed. You do not finish sooner — you simply get more done in the same time.

Production quality needs review and judgment

Vibe coding is a method for handing the typing to an AI; it is not a method that lets you hand over the judging as well. Deciding what to build, judging whether a design is good, and confirming that what is written is factually correct all remain human work. What we were strict about in rebuilding our own site was exactly this division: the AI moves its hands, the human judges. Skip that division and you risk publishing factual errors and clumsy phrasing exactly as generated.

Consideration for security and copyright

The chance that AI-generated code contains a known vulnerability pattern is not zero. It is also an area where the treatment of copyright is under debate, given the relationship to training data. The hand-it-over-without-reading style may rarely become a serious problem within hobby scope, but it is not suited to anything published externally for a business.

Be careful with confidential information

Avoid pasting a client’s personal data, or confidential material such as an unannounced business plan, straight into an AI tool as part of your instructions. How input data is handled differs from tool to tool, so for business use you should check the terms of service and the data handling policy, and then take precautions — masking confidential details, or replacing them with dummy data.

The gap between “it works” and “it can be used in a business”

There is still distance between a demo running on your machine and something that can be operated as a production environment shown to customers and business partners. Display speed, handling by search engines, behavior when traffic spikes, whether inquiries arriving from a form are processed correctly — verification at a business level is not completed by instructing an AI alone.

There are cases it doesn’t suit

Honestly, not all development suits vibe coding. Complex internal systems handling payments or large volumes of personal data, tightly regulated fields such as medicine and finance, and development that integrates closely with an existing large-scale system are, in my view, areas where a human with specialist knowledge should hold the initiative on design rather than widening the scope handed to AI. Judge “whether it can be done” and “whether the method is appropriate” separately.

How we divide work between Webflow and AI sites

Here is our practical criterion. Anything where the client explicitly wants it built in Webflow, we build entirely in Webflow. For everything else, we currently recommend AI website production.

The reason is clear: AI now performs better than a human at building it. A website has hundreds of items that need to be checked, and if a human fills them all in, a substantial amount of time is wasted on the checking alone.

And that is not all. If you have the AI write all of the code, produce the design, and hold the company’s information, that AI becomes able to answer anything about the company. It can even produce invoices and sales material. It is not comparable to an AI secretary managed through ChatGPT’s memory. Because it is an AI that holds both all of the site’s information and the design information, it can output PDFs and invoices with a consistent look.

This is the idea of “one AI per company,” and I believe the site is the foundation it stands on. This trend will properly arrive in about two or three years, I think. Right now it is still received as roughly “you can make a site easily with AI,” but the substance is not there — it lies further ahead.

Rebuilds stop happening, permanently

There is another structural advantage to an AI site: you can switch the AI model you use (Claude, GPT, Gemini and so on) to whichever is smartest at the time.

When you have built a site on a tool such as WordPress or Webflow, changing tools meant the double work of rebuilding the site. But with an AI site — that is, a full-stack site where everything is managed as code — the cost of rebuilding simply does not exist. All you do is swap the AI that serves as the brain inside.

Because it is built as code, performance is the best available and flexibility is at a maximum, and on top of that the brain can be exchanged as often as you like. With that structure, even if the models change over in five or ten years, you are unlikely ever to need to rebuild the site itself, in my view.

Frankly, I recommend AI sites even to people currently running on Webflow. Hearing “built with AI” may make it sound unstable, but with us, the humans, supervising that part, overwhelming performance is achievable. On the security level too, I believe we can take a position above Webflow (in fact, our site holds an A+ rating on both SSL Labs and Mozilla Observatory).

I think the very concept of a website is going to change

Let me write a little about what lies further ahead. When everyone starting a business can immediately produce what is now called a “stylish” site, that gets replaced by “the AI-looking site,” and its value collapses. Most people will be talking to ChatGPT and turning out attractive sites one after another.

But a trend will certainly emerge there too. Whether it becomes 3D metaverses, or sites that behave like games, is impossible to picture right now. The wave will come, though. All that is needed to ride that wave early is to keep chasing the smartest AI, I believe. As noted above, with an AI site you can do that just by switching models. When the next movement happens, you can switch first and make the first move.

Can vibe coding be a job?

From a production company’s position, my honest answer: yes, it can. But the place where the value is created shifts.

Being able to write code used to have value in itself. Now that vibe coding has spread, the weight of the typing has dropped, and in its place the requirements definition of what should be built, the aesthetic judgment on design, the fact-checking of what is written, and the reviewing power to judge each stage complete have become the center of value more than ever. Those four were exactly the roles the human took on in rebuilding our own site.

Turned around, that means “just giving instructions to an AI” does not automatically produce a high-quality business site or app. Precisely because the tools became usable by anyone, the gap between those who can judge and those who cannot becomes the gap in results. That is what I feel day to day in the field. For an individual or a company alike, how you sharpen that power of judgment is, I believe, the dividing line from here on.

How to make your 0 → 1

How do you start from a position with no track record? The answer is simple: first make your 0 → 1 with your own thing. Your own site, your own app. If it is running, that in itself is a track record.

Once you have one, use it as fuel to build a second and a third. There is no shortcut other than that order, in my view. If you try to fill your first entry with “someone else’s project,” you cannot escape the loop of having no track record so you cannot win work, and not winning work so you have no track record. With your own thing, you can escape that circle by your own decision alone.

For freelancers and small production companies it is a tailwind, too. Because the time implementation takes is compressed, work at a scale only large-headcount companies used to be able to take on can now be taken on by a small team. We ourselves have shortened the production period per project substantially by making this method our mainstay.

Summary

Vibe coding is a phrase that spread far enough to be named Word of the Year less than a year after Karpathy’s post, but its substance is simple: a method of instructing an AI in natural language and proceeding without writing every line of code. The mechanism differs from no-code, and the higher freedom makes human checking and review indispensable. Try it casually if it is a hobby; if you are using it in a business, approach it on the premise that humans take on the judging and the reviewing.

We offer website production and app development by vibe coding as an actual business. For details see our AI website production page, and for the build process of our own site we have published the full record of production, git history and all. If you are considering production by vibe coding and just want to talk through the parts that need a judgment call, please feel free to start with a free consultation.

FAQ

Can I do it with zero programming knowledge?

With a browser-only tool, you can build small things from zero knowledge. Once it becomes a production site or app used in a business, though, you need either enough knowledge to judge and review the output, or a setup where you work with someone who can judge it.

Can I do it for free?

More and more tools have a free tier, so trying it out costs nothing to begin with. Using it seriously, however, usually means usage-based charges or a monthly plan. In our case, Claude Code alone costs around ¥30,000 a month.

Which tool should I start with?

If you have no programming experience, start with a browser-only tool such as Figma Make; if you have the basics of development, try a coding agent such as Claude Code. Build something small first and get a feel for working through dialogue.

Is it dangerous to build a company website with vibe coding?

It is dangerous if you stay with the hand-it-over-without-reading usage. But if you insert steps where humans decide the requirements, check what is generated, and review the facts and the security, it holds up perfectly well as a production method for a business site. We build and operate our own site this way.