From Building my Website to AI: An Excuse for "Vibe Coding"

You may never think about code - the billions of lines written in multiple programming languages - but you wouldn’t be reading this essay without it. Nor doing anything else in the digital world, for that matter. Assisting developers in writing code was one of the first and most productive uses of Generative AI. Programming languages are… well… languages, the domain where LLMs¹ excel. But now AI has expanded from assisting developers to assisting “anybody”, and “Vibe coding” is one of the latest trends²: you write your idea³, go through iterations in a conversation just like you do with your AI bot of choice, and, voilà, your application is ready.

Even before the term “vibe coding” was coined, and after hearing for weeks that anybody could build software with so-called “no-code” builders, I had to try!

Before I share my learnings, let me give some background on my programming skills - or lack thereof. I wrote some code between the ages of 18 and 25 while I was studying. I’ve managed tech companies, but the closest I’ve come to any code in the last 25 years was editing some basic HTML for my husband’s first website as an artist - You may be shocked if you’ve done the math, I know, I look much younger! Many of the programming languages I used are probably as dead as Latin by now (Fortran⁴, anyone?), and I had to ask AI where to find the command window⁵ on my Mac. You get the idea: I have a mental framework that helps me understand how it all works, but when it comes to writing code, I am about as useless as a carpenter in an operating room.

So, I tried one of these digital DIY projects at the end of last year for something basic. “Let me build a calendar app for others to book appointments with me online”, I thought. I don’t know about you, but all my subscriptions are adding up quite nicely, and my Calendly free trial was about to end.

Among all the available tools at the time, I chose Replit. I quickly realized the promise of the “create your app for free” button was as empty as the promise from one of those companies selling shared ownership homes in the Caribbean to “enjoy a free meal and day at the pool”. Of course, you have to pay a subscription if you intend to do anything meaningful or slightly functional. I was on one of those days, though, so pumped up by the possibility of becoming the master of my digital destiny that I paid for the annual plan upfront.

If you were wondering, my only regret on the day the shared ownership company invited me to the pool was the waste of time.

A few prompts in Replit and my “Book time with Noelia” site quickly took shape. Replit and I were conversing away and getting along nicely but, as I started to test the integration with Google calendar and email, we quickly moved into what we would call a “Diálogo de Besugos”⁶ in Spanish: a long tirade of back and forth messages in which he claimed that the error was fixed and I kept repeating it didn’t work.

Oops! I know Replit’s conversational agent is an “it”, and I have to force myself to remember that! The level of frustration must have reminded me of some other conversation with a “he”, and my brain slipped. Either that or my brain still subconsciously resorts to generalizing with the masculine and just thought Replit was a person, who knows? Yes, generalizing with the masculine is what we learned at school in my generation, so you see again how old I am.

What made me finally stop after three hours or so of attempting to build this basic application was that I needed some secret key from my email account that Google said I didn’t have the right to get. I concluded it was not a good use of my time, asked for a refund, and to their credit, Replit gave me my money back right away!

Three months later, I decided to give it another try. I had to publish my website anyway, so why not use one of these no-code builders instead of managed services on WordPress? Let’s go!

I settled on Lovable, a Swedish company. The fact that they were European may have influenced my decision… or did I realize that later? I did subscribe, but only for a month (I seem to have learned to moderate my impulses just a bit). I took advantage of a business trip to write the code for my website, and I worked on it between meetings over two days. It must have taken about four or five hours overall, but it could have been done in one or two hours if the content had been ready when I started. It is possibly longer than what it would have taken with WordPress, I admit, but it gave me so much flexibility! I also own the code and I can take it anywhere. I did have to figure out some “techy” things, like how to turn the JavaScript⁷ code into something that I could upload to my hosting service, but Lovable was right there to provide any instructions I needed, and I have to confess I enjoyed bossing him (it!!!) around to change things here or there.

Some of the conversation I had with Lovable’s conversational interface to build my website.

I had heard others’ opinions about what this everybody-can-code shift may mean for the future - both the very optimistic ones⁸ and the more cautious ones⁹, as you surely expected if you have read my previous essay - but this little exercise informed my opinion quite a bit more. Also, not surprisingly, the effort required to write this article instigated new thoughts. Effort, writing, thoughts… so many things in one sentence we should not undervalue when using AI!

Asking for something in your own words and getting it done instantly almost feels like magic, just as graphical user interfaces felt magical when we were used to command lines. And if graphical user interfaces opened the digital world to so many people who were not digital till then, conversational user interfaces are already doing the same so much faster. Even if the “no-code” label is a bit of an overstatement at the moment (I’d expect most people without coding experience to still choose services like WordPress, with their drags and drops), the shift may happen much sooner than you think if you have no coding experience. If you are in the emerging tech world, it will probably take longer than you think, as we often forget the digital world has to meet the organic one. But what seems clear to me is that the shift is happening.

And I can’t help but wonder: Could this be a way to decentralize and give digital power back to the people? Could small digital companies have a better shot at long-term survival in the new ecosystem that rises, or will power end up even more concentrated? Will this bring tighter software thanks to expert computer scientists empowered by AI, or will the digital space degrade due to a bunch of “spaghetti code” that is difficult to understand and maintain? Will no-code builders like Replit or Lovable bring people closer to understanding code, or will they have the opposite effect?

I have no answers, but let me just say that my curiosity brought me closer to the code than I had ever been in 25 years, and I’d encourage you to do the same: get just a bit closer from wherever your starting point may be. Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing. The world is changing very quickly, and the new AI wave will most likely affect you whether you want it or not. You may as well understand what’s coming, and as we would say in Spain, take the bull by the horns.

1. LLMs: A type of artificial intelligence algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content.

2. I feel compelled to clarify: a) I acknowledge this is only a trend in the small, but powerful, AI community (I do know there is another world out there!) and b) it will likely be old news by the time you read this.

3. Imagine saying: “Write the code for an Android app that does X”, and getting one. Or even better, saying “You are an expert prompt engineer who wants to build an Android app to do X. Write the best prompt for that”; and then using the resulting prompt to build the app.

4. Fortran: A programming language especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing deeloped by IBM in 1958.

5. A text-based user interface to run programs.

6. Literally seabream talk, but used to refer a dialogue between people who keep rambling without making sense of what each other is saying, nor making progress.

7. JavaScript: a programming language that can be used for both front-end web development (what users see in their browsers) and back-end development (the server-side operations that happen behind the scenes).

8. Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, on the future of programming with AI.

9. Gary Markus's commentary on the future of programming with AI.