Vibe Coding: From Idea to Digital Product in Hours

The concept of Vibe Coding has radically transformed the speed at which we can create digital products. It involves developing software by conversing with artificial intelligence (AI), a way to delegate a large part of code generation and design to AI, albeit always under our supervision. This way of creating with AI allows creators, designers, innovators, and marketers to prototype or launch solutions without needing a deep technical background.

At FREED, we have intensely explored this new way of working through various sessions and open practices, using tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Cursor. Personally, for practical purposes and to delve deeper into a tool I'm already familiar with, I stuck with Lovable. But within our community, several colleagues have joined to share their projects with other tools like Base 44.

The most amazing projects created with Vibe Coding

We started by experimenting and then facilitated open streaming sessions on our YouTube channel.

We showcased an internal project for automating our own processes: a prototype for tracking and managing coaching projects, aiming to automate bureaucratic tasks such as report generation and meeting summaries, as well as progress visualization. 

It's my dashboard as a coach and my clients' dashboard. I built it based on my experience as a coach-mentor for the UN and business accelerators like Masisa Lab. Generally, I work with 15 to 30 companies at a time; they are e-commerce businesses or startups. The workflows you see there are real: I start by auditing their digital assets and continue with individual and group sessions. Eventually, I also get involved in the business to solve problems.

The idea behind these open Vibe Coding sessions was to encourage others to try creating their products with AI, and it worked.

Our sessions have been a hotbed of creativity, generating numerous functional prototypes and proof-of-concepts in record time, sometimes in just three hours and some free practice.

As you can see, Vibe Coding makes the creation of MVPs (minimum viable products) or prototypes practically instantaneous. Some of the most notable prototypes built by participants in our sessions and community members include:

A pet-friendly taxi (PetRide)

A dog bark translator (BarkTranslate)

A personal style assistant for men (Menswear Maven)

An operational KPI dashboard for mining

Advantages of Vibe Coding

The main advantage of Vibe Coding is its execution speed, which makes it much faster than traditional processes, avoiding high initial costs and long waiting times. Additionally, I would highlight the following:

• Democratization of development: It is accessible to people without coding experience, such as designers and marketers, allowing them to bring their ideas to life.
• Strategic focus: Developers and consultants can concentrate on architecture, system strategy, and human connection with the client, delegating coding to AI.
• Cost and time savings: Development is much more economical and faster than traditional processes.
• Accelerated learning: Tools like Lovable and Base 44 often explain their development logic and architecture, which is excellent for learning.
  

As an educator, prototyping and developing products with AI seems like an incredible work modality to facilitate collaboration between design and development teams. A priori, I would say that developers have a certain advantage. Likewise, a lack of knowledge in user experience (UX) and interface design, in general, could be compensated by AI.

What becomes a bit more complex on the other side is that designers will have to learn about technical aspects of the software development process. But that's for a future chapter.

Challenges of Vibe Coding

Like everything in life, there are also disadvantages, which is why I want to highlight the challenges I see in relation to the use of this technology in various aspects:

• Scalability and security: AI produces prototypes, but building stable, secure, and scalable products remains a challenge that requires specialized technical knowledge.
• Code and content quality: Platforms can generate unnecessarily complex or "junk code," which consumes more resources. The generated content must be audited by the creator.
• Recurring cost: Scalability can involve recurring subscription costs and the consumption of credits or tokens for each query or automation.
• Risk of homogenization: By using the same tools and prompts as everyone else, there is a risk that all products (or content) will look the same.
• Loss of focus: The ease and speed of development can lead to a loss of focus discipline, resulting in undertaking too many projects at once.
  

Join the FREED community!

We have found that Vibe Coding is not only fast but also forces us to elevate the level of conversation: to think about architecture, design, strategy, and user experience before the line of code.

If you are passionate about creating digital products and want to continue exploring these tools:

• Share your experience: We invite you to advance your projects and share them with the community.
• Deepen your learning: We plan to hold more sessions focused on structure, design, code quality, security, and go-to-market, inviting experts to validate crucial technical aspects.
• Find accountability partners: Join our community to be accountable for your progress and receive constructive feedback.
• Connect: Join our various communication channels (WhatsApp, LinkedIn) so you don't miss upcoming practices, discussions, and technical talks!
  

Dare to create and keep learning with FREED AI Studio!

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I also invite you to join our WhatsApp community. It's a free community where we aim to share insights on human behavior, business, and technology. However, we don't want bots or spam, so we ask you to leave your details in a form to be added to the community. All data will be manually reviewed. 

Keep reading

• Internet search trends: the irruption of artificial intelligence in SEO
• Buyer persona: what it is and how to identify it

If you also want to turn this content into audio —narrated summaries, podcast versions or synthetic voices for prototypes— the tool we use at FREED is ElevenLabs. (Affiliate link: signing up through it supports FREED at no extra cost to you.)