What Vibe Coding Is (and What It Is Not)

"Vibe coding" sounds like a meme. In practice, it is a workflow.

You describe what you want in natural language. An AI-native editor generates structure, code, and fixes in tight loops. You steer constantly. Not once at the beginning. Not once at the end.

What it is

• Conversation as compiler. Prompts become UI, routes, components, and refactors.
• High iteration. You optimize for learning velocity, not perfect first drafts.
• Human taste in the loop. You reject, redirect, and simplify as soon as something feels off.

What it is not

• A license to ship without understanding what you shipped.
• A replacement for product strategy.
• "No-code." There is still logic, state, and consequences.
• Magic for enterprise compliance, security, or scale (those still require adult supervision).

Early in the GoYou build, Cursor confidently wrote an onboarding screen that looked clean and tested terribly the first time I clicked through it. The questions were ordered for the model to write, not for a tired human to answer. I scrapped it and started over with the user, not the schema. The lesson stuck. The tool can produce something coherent before you have figured out whether it should exist.

Why marketers should care

Most marketing leaders do not need to become senior engineers. They need to compress the distance between idea and artifact.

When you can click through a prototype you helped build:

• messaging gets sharper
• handoffs get shorter
• prioritization gets more honest
• you stop debating abstractions you have never touched

That is the vibe. Not casualness, but staying in contact with the thing.

My simple rules

1. One slice at a time (one screen, one flow).
2. Name the user and the failure mode before the feature.
3. Keep a running "what I rejected" list. That list is the product.
4. When the tool hallucinates confidence, slow down and verify.

Vibe coding did not make me a developer. It made me a more dangerous builder.