The Wonder I Wasn't Expecting from Vibe Coding

Developing a game, website, or mobile application used to take experienced coders weeks, if not months. And if you were someone with no coding experience, like me, it was a nearly impossible task. Ideas would flow through your head, you could communicate them to friends or family, but they'd never become a reality because you didn't have the skills to build them, and you didn't have the time to learn.

Over the last few months, I've gone from barely being able to make a Squarespace website to building three fully functional websites, all of which I think look pretty good, in roughly eight hours.

How did I do it? Vibe coding.

Vibe coding is a term made popular by Andrej Karpathy, cofounder of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla. Karpathy famously wrote in a tweet that it's "not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." That's essentially what it is. You type or speak what you'd like to build into the Large Language Model (LLM) of your choice, such as Claude or ChatGPT, or into a purpose-built coding tool like Replit or Cursor, and almost instantly that thing comes to life and "mostly works." No experience. Just vibes.

Vibe coding comes with a lot of mixed opinions about the pros and cons, and I want to make it clear that I'm not going to argue any of them here. I'm simply going to discuss an unintended outcome of my own experience that I found worth sharing.

When I think about my childhood, one of the things I look back on most fondly is my ability to play completely imaginary games with my siblings. I distinctly remember my brothers and I playing a civilization-type game in our backyard growing up, where each of us got our own territory, and each territory had its own unique set of resources. My territory was under a pine tree, which obviously meant, in the mind of a seven-year-old, that my primary resource was emeralds: the bright green pine needles against the white-out winter woods. We'd play that game for hours on end, trading resources, forming and breaking treaties, fully immersed in a world we'd created.

That sense of wonder is abundant in the mind of a child. The feeling that everything can be anything and that anything is possible. As we age, though, wonder becomes a scarce resource in a world that tells us there isn't time for it. The "XYZ-maxing" society tells us that if something doesn't make you more money, get you in better shape, make you look better, or help you climb the next rung of the proverbial ladder, then it isn't worth your time. I'll be the first to admit I fell victim to that. Until recently I was working four jobs: my main full-time job, a start-up I'm trying to get off the ground, and two part-time jobs. That's what I thought I had to be doing to get to the next step, and it left me with no time to do anything else.

So where does vibe coding come into all this? I was stringing a lacrosse stick for a friend of mine. Based on his college film, I suggested a new head and a different string job, and it went great. That got me thinking that other people might want the same thing, a stick built for the way they actually play. So I decided to try building a website to do it. I started working in Claude, and within a couple of hours I had a functional website that did everything I wanted it to. Zero coding experience. Just prompting, following directions, and vibes.

That moment unlocked something in me that had been locked away for a long time. A child-like wonder that made me feel like anything was possible. All of a sudden that budgeting app I wanted, the one none of the other budgeting apps could do for me, was possible, and I built it in a couple of hours. My personal website, probably the ugliest thing you've ever seen built on Squarespace, is now something I'm proud of and actively share. I'm not building these things for anyone else, I'm not building them to be the next million-dollar business, I'm building them because now they're possible, and that brings me a kind of wonder I haven't felt since I was a child.

If you have an idea in your head that doesn't feel possible right now, try it. It might be code, it might be something else entirely. What I found on the other side of a few hours wasn't a website. It was the feeling that everything can be anything, and I hadn't felt that since the backyard.