AI Coding 101 — aka **Vibe Coding**

Why “Vibe Coding”?

Vibe coding is the practice of guiding a project through open-ended chat with a code-generating model. Instead of leaning on autocomplete for small snippets, you outline requirements in natural language and refine the AI's drafts. The human stays in charge of architecture and review while the model handles the boilerplate.

Coding used to mean wrestling with syntax until your wrists ached. Now you can chat with an LLM in plain English, toss it a half-formed idea, and watch it shape ideas in seconds. When i've used this method i've been able to build some pretty cool apps while pushing the boundaries of my expertise and learning more than ever on that journey.

Who This Guide Is For

New devs, 1+ year of CS interest who want to jumpstart projects without memorizing every API.
Senior engineers hunting leverage: less boilerplate, documenting, debugging and more ideas, architecture, planning
Side-project entrepreneurs who’d rather ship than sweat the small stuff.

If you write code and like shipping fast, read on. Heavy reliance on AI suggestions can introduce security risks or hidden bugs if left unchecked. Be prepared to refactor and audit the output, otherwise small mistakes can snowball into technical debt quickly

The Core Loop

Describe the intent.

“You are an expert in front end development. Build a React SPA as a dynamic pitch deck for my startup selling AI agents for your small business.”
Let the AI draft.
It produces a full Presentation App, Visuals, Transitions, tests and documentation.
Review, tweak, and test.
You stay in the driver’s seat, catching edge cases, verifying the funtionality, asking the right questions.
Iterate in chat.

“Refactor to use async/await and add rate limiting to presentation creation”

Repeat until it feels right. Your metric isn't lines of code; it's momentum and feedback. Even when the AI drafts most of the code, set aside time for thorough reviews and security checks before merging. Treat its output like code from a junior developer—promising but requiring scrutiny.

Tool Stack That Feels Good

Layer	Picks that pass the vibe check
Chat-first IDE	Cursor, Windsurf
Terminal pair-programmer	codex, Claude, lm-studio, ollama
Cloud muscle	Google Vertex AI, OpenAI Platform, Vercel
Glue scripts	A bit of Python or Typescript to stitch things together

Pick one from each row and you’re in business. Cursor and Copilot are proprietary services that cost money, while options like lm-studio, ollama, and AnythingLLM can run locally for free.

Hands-On Example: React Pitch Deck

Prompt

“You are an expert in front end development. Build a react SPA as a dynamic pitch deck for my startup selling AI agents for your small business. Give me a single HTML file that i can open in my browser.”

Live Example

Full Code

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0" />
  <title>AI Agent Pitch Deck</title>
  <!-- Tailwind via CDN -->
  <script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script>
  <!-- React 18 CDN -->
  <script src="https://unpkg.com/react@18/umd/react.development.js"></script>
  <script src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom@18/umd/react-dom.development.js"></script>
</head>

<body class="bg-gray-900 text-white overflow-hidden">
  <div id="root"></div>

  <script type="text/javascript">
    const { useState, useEffect } = React;

    function App() {
      const slides = [
        {
          title: "AI Agents for Small Business",
          subtitle: "Your Growth Co-Pilot",
          bullets: [],
        },
        {
          title: "The Pain",
          subtitle: "",
          bullets: [
            "Owners drown in repetitive tasks.",
            "CRMs, invoicing, and support stack don’t talk to each other.",
            "Every manual process bleeds margin."
          ],
        },
        {
          title: "Our Fix",
          subtitle: "",
          bullets: [
            "Drop-in AI agents that plug into the tools you already use.",
            "24/7 autonomy: support, invoicing, follow-ups, analytics.",
            "No code, no AI PhD required."
          ],
        },
        {
          title: "Product Highlights",
          subtitle: "",
          bullets: [
            "Inbox Agent – triages email + drafts smart replies.",
            "Revenue Agent – reconciles payments & nudges late payers.",
            "Insights Agent – forecasts sales, flags churn signals."
          ],
        },
        {
          title: "Why It Works",
          subtitle: "",
          bullets: [
            "LLM orchestration tuned for SMB data footprints.",
            "Privacy-first: on-prem or VPC-hosted.",
            "90-minute onboarding, live human backup anytime."
          ],
        },
        {
          title: "Business Model",
          subtitle: "",
          bullets: [
            "Tiered SaaS: $299 / $799 / custom enterprise.",
            "Usage-based overages for heavy workloads.",
            "Agency partners earn 20% recurring."
          ],
        },
        {
          title: "Let’s Build Your Agent Army",
          subtitle: "Book a pilot this week → founders@your-ai-agents.com",
          bullets: [],
        },
      ];

      const [index, setIndex] = useState(0);
      const total = slides.length;

      const next = () => setIndex(i => (i < total - 1 ? i + 1 : i));
      const prev = () => setIndex(i => (i > 0 ? i - 1 : i));

      useEffect(() => {
        const handler = (e) => {
          if (e.key === "ArrowRight") next();
          if (e.key === "ArrowLeft") prev();
        };
        window.addEventListener("keydown", handler);
        return () => window.removeEventListener("keydown", handler);
      }, []);

      const slide = slides[index];

      return (
        React.createElement("div", { className: "h-screen flex flex-col items-center justify-center p-8 select-none" },
          React.createElement("div", { className: "text-center space-y-6 transition-all duration-500" },
            React.createElement("h1", { className: "text-4xl md:text-6xl font-bold" }, slide.title),
            slide.subtitle && React.createElement("h2", { className: "text-xl md:text-2xl opacity-70" }, slide.subtitle),
            slide.bullets.length > 0 && React.createElement("ul", { className: "mt-6 space-y-2 text-left mx-auto max-w-xl list-disc list-inside" },
              slide.bullets.map((b, i) =>
                React.createElement("li", { key: i, className: "text-lg md:text-xl leading-snug" }, b)
              )
            )
          ),
          React.createElement("div", { className: "absolute bottom-6 left-0 right-0 flex items-center justify-between px-6 text-sm opacity-70" },
            React.createElement("button", { onClick: prev, className: "hover:opacity-100" }, "← Prev"),
            React.createElement("div", { className: "flex-1 mx-4 h-1 bg-gray-700 rounded" },
              React.createElement("div", {
                className: "h-1 bg-teal-400 rounded transition-all duration-300",
                style: { width: ((index + 1) / total) * 100 + "%" }
              })
            ),
            React.createElement("button", { onClick: next, className: "hover:opacity-100" }, "Next →")
          )
        )
      );
    }

    ReactDOM.createRoot(document.getElementById("root")).render(React.createElement(App));
  </script>
</body>

</html>

Wrapping Up

Vibe coding is about maintaining a high velocity, releasing a little bit of control over the code while the AI handles the repetitive pieces. Start with small experiments like the pitch deck above and gradually layer on automation. The more you converse with your models, the better they can translate your intent into working code. Stay curious, keep shipping, and remember AI can help guide you.

When adopting these tools, stay mindful of data privacy and the limitations of current models. They occasionally hallucinate or reuse licensed snippets, so validate outputs and keep human judgment in the loop.

AI Coding 101 — aka Vibe Coding