The Essential Guide to Vibe Coding

Sarah Greene owns a small bakery in Portland. Business is good, but she keeps missing opportunities—customers call asking about custom cakes for weddings and birthdays, but by the time Sarah calls back between baking shifts, they have often gone with someone else. She needs a way for people to request custom orders online, anytime.

The traditional path would look something like this: hire a developer for $2,000+, wait weeks for delivery, then pay more every time she needs changes. Or, she could spend months learning to code herself—HTML for structure, CSS for making it look good, JavaScript for the interactive bits, then figure out how to handle form submissions and email notifications.

Sarah does neither.

Instead, she opens Claude.ai, and over her lunch break, she has this conversation:

I own a bakery. I need a simple webpage where customers can order custom cakes. They should be able to pick the size, flavor, filling, and date they need it. I want a text box where they can describe what they want the cake to look like. When they submit it, I should get an email with all their order details.

She does a few small changes, and five minutes later she has working code. She copies it into a free website host, tests it by ordering a fictional cake for herself, and gets the order email. It works.

But the form feels cluttered. She wants to add a question about dietary restrictions.

So, she tells Claude:

Can you make the background a softer cream color? Put the size and date fields on the same line to save space. And add a checkbox for nut allergies.

Two minutes later, those changes are done.

By the end of her lunch break, Sarah has a custom cake order form that matches her bakery’s branding and does exactly what she needs. No code learned. No syntax memorized. Just clear descriptions of what she wanted.

This is vibe coding. You describe what you want to build, refine it by describing what you want to change, and end up with working software—no computer science degree required.