Practical and direct Vibe Coding: Build What You Need Without Learning to Code

This She Loves Data AI Trend Session this month was not a typical session, hosted by Aishwarya Ramakrishnan . It was Interactive, supportive, and most importantly, fun. Through guided activities, we created and enhanced features using Vibe coding. 

So what exactly is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is the practice of using AI to generate code through natural language prompts. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe what you want to build, and the AI builds it. No need to speak the language of machines. Your own words are enough.

It has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason.

Why is it worth paying attention to? 

The most immediate benefit is speed. Vibe coding lets you go from idea to working prototype quickly, without significant development time or a technical background.

A few things it is particularly useful for:

• The AI acts as an interpretive layer, so you don’t have to speak the language of machines - formal language as developers do. You can use your own natural language to prompt the AI as you build or enhance your application. 
• It allows you to test your ideas. Vibe coding is ideal for requirements refinement and experimental Proof of Concepts that will be thrown away. By allowing you to see and interact with what you are trying to build, it provides the opportunity to refine your requirements without having to write a line of code and without significant investment of development time. Vibe Coding, due to the ease of creating applications, provides you with the opportunity to see and interact with what you are trying to build. 
• You can still see under the hood to see how this is done if you have some development background.

What do Vibe Coding and Traditional Programming have in common?

A few things do not change, regardless of the tool. 

• For one, you do need to understand the problem you are trying to solve. Although you don’t need to do a traditional requirements document to begin Vibe Coding, having a clear idea of the problem you want to solve or what the software must do will better ensure that the application you are going to build will solve the problem or do what you need it to do. 
• Secondly, it’s an iterative process of improvement -  In that you keep prompting until you get what you need, similar to software development, where you follow the software development life cycle of building, testing, and reviewing in many iterations until the application built meets the needs of the user.

Tools used in the session 

These are the tools Aish walked us through: 

• Lovable: https://lovable.dev/
• Bolt: https://bolt.new/
• v0 by Vercel: https://v0.app/
• Replit: https://replit.com/
• Cursor: https://cursor.com/ 

Before you dive in:

A few principles worth keeping in mind as you get started:

• Be Specific 
• Break Tasks into steps
• Step-by-Step Prompting
• Provide Context
• Use Examples
• Give Clear Input and Output Examples
• Ask AI to validate step by Step
• Provide Trigger and Action Clearly
• Provide Sample Data and Ask AI for patterns
• Specify Metric and Alerts

That said, expect to iterate. Vibe coding is a process of continuous refinement, not a one-shot solution.

If there is an application you have been sitting on, or a feature you have been meaning to improve, now is a good time to open a new tab, pick one of the tools above, and start.

Written By:

Jeneil Stephen, Volunteer, She Loves Data