How to "vibe code" properly?

I actually consider myself a master "vibe coder", and I think that the future of software development is going to be vibe coding. Vibe coding is a method where you describe what you want a program to do in simple words, and an AI tool generates that code for you. It is used to make software development easier and potentially take our jobs too.

The term vibe coding was first introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, and it took the tech Twitter / X by storm when tech millionaire and indiehacker Peter Levels vibe coded an entire game and made $80k+ with it in less than a month.

Some people (including myself) believe that vibe coding is the future of coding because once you used that, you will never be able to go back. Anthropic's CEO says that programmers will be replaced by AI vibe coders by the end of 2025. I personally don't think AI will replace us this soon, but let's see what happens.

I've been messing around with vibe coding for a while and man, that is so cool. It makes you feel like you're in a sci-fi movie. You just give your IDE a prompt and it generates code for you. I vibe coded so many projects with AI and today I will share everything here:

Just before we start, I would really appreciate you following my Twitter/X account.

First steps

The first thing you need to know about vibe coding is a small understanding of how code works. I would suggest watching some YouTube crash course videos on a programming language, or a reading a chapter about the basics of programming. You will also need an understanding of AI models and how they work and how to talk with them for best result.

With that said, I first pitch the idea to ChatGPT and ask it about the tech I should use for the project and also the tools and everything in between. Then I will ask it to give itself a prompt for the project and what we talked about - it always worked for me. Then I copy the generated prompt from ChatGPT and go to Claude (I prefer using Claude for my programming tasks, but to be fair GPT-4 can do the job too), I paste the copied prompt from ChatGPT and ask Claude to give me a step by step guide of how to build this project. Claude then gives me the needed steps and it even gives me some code to copy paste to my project. I would always get the foundation code from Claude before going to my IDE and ask that to code for me because it helps a lot for the IDE to have an understanding of what you want to create and also the design language and tools that I want to use.

Then...

Then I would go to my IDE (Cursor, WindSurf, Visual Studio Code with Copilot etc.) and ask it to index the whole project and also tell it about what I want to create (you can copy paste the prompt generated by ChatGPT too). It takes a while for your IDE to index your code and understand your needs and your codebase - so stay patient.

Then ask your IDE what you want to build and tell it to give you the needed files one by one. Mostly, IDE's don't know what to create - so you will have to go to your chatbot again and ask it not to give you the code but a guide on what to create first and how to create it to get to the final version.

Example Prompt:

"Now that you already have a basic understanding of the project, tell me how to approach making this project one by one. Act like a software engineer and give me the phases I should work on and how to approach each step."

Now that you've gotten the whole explanation of each phase from the chatbot, what you have to do is to copy each phase's details and paste it to your IDE and the AI will do the job.

Note

We are working with Artificial Intelligence so of course human inputs will be needed and you will have to make the AI understand how to approach what you want it to create. Also, keep in mind that AI is not that good with security related stuff, so make sure to review the codes of the apps which must be secure or make a professional audit your code for security vulnerabilities.

This was the easiest I could describe the vibe coding process. I know it isn't complete and I would love to hear your approach on how to vibe code properly. I don't have a comments section on my website, yet, since I don't have a CMS so you can send me your inputs and comments through email hi@haroonazizi.com or send me a DM on my Twitter @az_haroon.