How To Vibe Code for Beginners in Five Easy Steps | Inc. Explains

You've got a great idea, but you need an army of coders to bring it to life. Not anymore. Today, we're going to take you through the basics of building your own product with AI. It's called vibe coding, and with a few tips, anyone can do it. Vibe coding is essentially the act of using AI as a translator that can convert human language like English into computer language like Python. Instead of writing functions or syntax, you describe your desired software's behavior, layout, and intent. But let's get something straight. Vibe coding isn't magic. You can't just press a button and come back to a finished website 30 minutes later. — It's more like managing an employee, but without performance reviews. Because vibe coding is such a collaborative process, the best way to understand it is to see it in action. Here's the goal. Build a browser game that tests your understanding of vibe coding and prompting. We're going to use three popular vibe coding platforms, ChatGpt, Claude, and Lovable, because I want you to see how differently each one will respond to the same prompt. Step one, get chatty with the AI. The most important rule of vibe coding is this. Overexplain. More context is always better for these AI coders, so don't be afraid to be verbose. Your prompt should be as long as you need and as specific as possible. Here's the first prompt I'm putting into Lovable, Claude, and Chat GBT. Bear with me because it's pretty long. Create a web-based game called Prompt Detective, where players see rendered mini websites and have to drag and drop phrase tiles to reconstruct the AI prompt that could have generated it. Include five levels with different fake websites, including signup forms, dashboards, product cards, chat UIs, and pricing tables. Some titles should include red herrings or distractions that will make the game more difficult. If you're finding it difficult to write a long prompt, try just saying it out loud as you type. And if that feels awkward, most programs also support voice dictation, so you can actually just talk through the idea instead of typing it out. Step two, check the result. So this is lovable. You can see that it's thinking here, right? It starts saying, "Oh, this is a brilliant concept. " Then it starts editing. It starts putting together files. Each of these files kind of comes together in the folder to become an app. So here we've got chat GPT. You can see here code is starting to populate in the page and that's what we like to see. This is Claude code, which is the original AI coder that really took the world by storm. After about a minute, we've got three different playable games kind of GPT. It's still not quite there yet, which brings us to the core truth of vibe coding. Step three, keep trying. It's important to remember that vibe coding is iterative. So, I'm going to give my programs a second prompt. Refine the game logic. Make the explanations clearer and more educational. Add a final screen that summarizes what vibe coding actually is, and make sure all buttons work reliably. Let's try it. Chat GPT has actually stalled out the last couple of times that we tried to give it the original prompt. This is basically a failure, but this is actually exactly what I wanted to show you. You're going to fail when you're building with AI. It is simply inevitable. We're on our third attempt now. But this is a really good example of how anytime that you give the AI a prompt, even if you give the same AI model the same prompts twice, it's going to create different stuff. It's truly a if at first you don't succeed, then try again style of development. Let's check back on some of our other ones. So, and now we've got a vibe coding game. With one click, at least some of the models created the necessary structure without me writing a single line of code. You can use this process to make pretty much anything. Here's the less fun part. Step four, check security. Vibe coding tools optimize for speed, but they don't always remember to integrate cyber security practices into the code. That's why you should always direct the AI platform of your choice to conduct a security review. Remember, AI doesn't understand risk the way humans do. A 2025 report from Veraricode found that 45% of AI generated code contains security flaws. These security flaws make it easier for hackers to make changes or gain info from your site or application without permission. If you really want to get your product into the world, the best practice is to have a human coder review it and make sure your product is buttoned up. If this was a real product, we'd probably have a real security specialist looking at it. But we don't have one of those right now. So, we're just going to ask the AI to do it. What we can do, there's a little button over here that says review security. We ask it to do a security scan. So basically, it's going through the codebase and looking for potential flaws that it can highlight. The point of this is to keep yours and others information safe. It's also just standard practice with developing a piece of software. Step five, publish. Everything looks solid, so now it's time to publish. Chat GPT came through for us at the end. There's still a lot here that probably could be fixed. Some of the stuff that we were working on with the other models, this still has to figure out, but here we go. three games that have varying levels of fun and workability. And if you do want to go deeper, you can go really, really far with these tools. And there you have it. Just using AI doesn't guarantee good software, but it does change who gets to try making good software. What are you going to build?