Vibe Coding: Pros, Cons and Tools

What is vibe coding good for?

Vibe coding is a good fit when speed, iteration, and hands-on control matter more than heavy engineering.

1) Marketing sites

Vibe coding is great for small to medium marketing pages, promo microsites, product demos, and quick campaigns.

It also works well for simple portfolios. You can ship something polished fast, explore interactive ideas, and swap copy or visuals on the spot. For complex, high-traffic sites with deep integrations, a traditional build still wins.

2) Internal tools

It's also perfect for quick dashboards, admin views, and CRUD-style utilities. You can get a working tool in front of teammates quickly, gather feedback, and evolve it without waiting for a long dev cycle.

3) Dashboards on a standard component library

If your team already uses a familiar component set, vibe coding helps you assemble tables, filters, charts, and forms fast—then tweak spacing, states, and flows as you test with users.

4) Micro-apps for research/validation

Need to confirm an idea or test a flow? Spin up a small, single-purpose app, put it in front of real people, learn, and either toss it or grow it. Low risk, high learning.

5) Solo founders

When you’re wearing every hat, vibe coding compresses the path from idea to demo. You can get something real in days, not weeks, and keep iterating without handoffs.

6) Designers who want more control over product (output)

This is where it gets exciting for UX/UI designers. Vibe coding tightens the loop between your decisions and the working interface.

Instead of stopping at mockups, you can shape the actual output (layout, copy, states, even small behaviors) by describing what you want and adjusting in real time. You still respect limits (performance, security, data), but you don’t lose momentum waiting on every small change.

Quick rule of thumb: vibe coding is a great fit for non-regulated flows, modest complexity, and standard web stacks. If you need strict performance, heavy integrations, or sensitive data handling, bring engineering in early.

What is vibe coding not good for?

Vibe coding is great for speed and iteration, but there are places where you should reach for a traditional build and an engineering-led review.

1) Regulated flows

Anything that touches compliance (payments, healthcare, finance, identity, etc.) needs strict controls, audits, and documentation. AI-generated code can help you explore, but production work here should follow formal standards and reviews.

2) Complex multi-service logic

If your product depends on many services talking to each other (orchestration, queues, retries, edge cases), you'll need clear architecture, tests, and observability. Those are the things that are hard to “vibe” safely.

3) Performance-critical UI

Interfaces that must hit tight frame budgets, smooth animations across devices, or heavy data grids need careful profiling and optimization. Quick scaffolds are fine for demos, but production needs engineering attention.

4) Strict SLOs (service-level objectives) or data residency constraints

When you’ve promised uptime/latency guarantees or must keep data in specific regions, you need predictable code paths, deployment controls, and monitoring.

You can prototype with vibe coding, but shipping here requires deliberate engineering practices.

Designer-friendly tools for vibe coding

v0 by Vercel

Vibe coding is changing how software is built. Tools like v0 make it possible to turn ideas into working prototypes in seconds. v0 runs automated security checks on every project and has already blocked thousands of insecure deployments before production.

Framer

Framer Workshop is an AI-powered component generator. It’s built for rapid iteration and exploration without writing code, so designers can generate and tweak interactive effects, utility tools, and visual components quickly. All that makes it a great fit for vibe coding.

Framer Wireframer turns a single prompt into a clean, responsive page structure. It’s built for structure, not style, which makes it ideal for layout-first workflows and early client feedback. Designers can experiment with site architecture quickly, then refine and style as they go—which makes it perfect for vibe coding.

Replit

Replit is an AI-powered platform that enables users to build apps and websites quickly using natural language. It focuses on fast, accessible AI-driven app building—empowering individuals and teams to rapidly turn ideas into working software, securely and collaboratively.

Cursor

Cursor is an advanced AI-powered coding platform designed to make developers highly productive. Cursor positions itself as the new standard for software development, combining the latest AI models with robust platform features to boost developer efficiency and enjoyment.

Windsurf

Windsurf is an AI-powered coding platform designed to maximize developer productivity and maintain a flow state. Windsurf aims to streamline coding, enhance creativity, and support both individual developers and organizations with advanced AI features, memory of past workflows, powerful codebase management, and support for multiple platforms and plugins.

Lovable

Lovable is a platform that allows you to create apps and websites by chatting with AI. The main feature is an AI chat interface where you can request the creation of various web projects—even simply asking it to generate a landing page. Lovable targets users who want to rapidly design and launch web projects with the help of AI, with strong community and resource support.

Claude Code

Claude Code is a tool from Anthropic. It's designed to boost developer productivity by automating workflows directly in the terminal. 

Claude Code recently released a new update. You can now turn design into code with Claude Code and Figma. Through MCP, Claude can read component hierarchies, design tokens, and auto-layout rules to generate and refine code closer to what you expect.

Bolt

Bolt AI Builder is an online tool designed for creating websites, apps, and prototypes using conversational AI. Users can type in their ideas, and the platform collaborates through chat to turn these into functional apps or websites.

Bolt supports importing projects from Figma and GitHub, making it useful for both design and development workflows. The platform is provided by StackBlitz. Bolt AI puts the spotlight on the ease of use for both individual creators and teams seeking rapid prototyping and collaborative building experiences.

These tools are a great choice and make vibe coding more accessible for designers. If you’re also looking at how AI fits into design portfolios, we cover that in our article on showcasing AI skills in a design portfolio.

How this changes design workflow

Vibe coding is reshaping the traditional flow where designers hand off the design to developers. Instead of stopping at mockups, designers can now push ideas into working interfaces themselves by describing the outcome to AI.

What was once a two-step process, design then implementation, starts to feel like a single ongoing activity.

This doesn’t mean developers disappear. Complex systems, regulated flows, and performance-critical products still need engineering craft. But for marketing sites, prototypes, etc., vibe coding transforms the process into a design-only loop: you sketch the idea, refine it in natural language, and see it immediately.

For designers, that means tighter feedback cycles, fewer delays, and more control over the actual product output. Instead of waiting for implementation, you can test, tweak, and iterate in real time, which brings design intent much closer to what users actually experience.

Pros of vibe coding

The biggest advantage of vibe coding is speed. You can go from idea to a working prototype in hours or days, rather than waiting weeks for a traditional design-to-dev cycle. That makes it perfect for MVPs, quick experiments, and validation projects.

AI also takes care of the boring parts. It generates boilerplate code automatically, handles repetitive tasks, and frees up time for more creative problem-solving. Designers and developers can focus on what makes the product unique instead of setting up frameworks from scratch.

Iteration becomes natural. Instead of handing off, waiting, and reviewing, you can tweak your description, regenerate, and see changes live. That loop gives immediate feedback, which makes the process more dynamic and rewarding.

It also lowers the barrier to entry. Because you don’t need to memorize complex syntax, more people can take part in building software. That includes people without a traditional coding background.

Finally, vibe coding encourages creativity and experimentation. With less overhead and lower costs, you can try ideas without the fear of failure. AI suggestions can spark approaches you might not have considered, while the low price of iteration makes it easier to explore multiple directions before committing.

Cons of vibe coding

Vibe coding comes with risks you need to account for. AI-generated code can hide vulnerabilities such as injection flaws or improper access controls. It can also mishandle data, which raises the chance of leaks or insecure handling.

Maintainability can suffer. When code is generated quickly without clear structure or documentation, it becomes harder for teams to review, debug, or improve later. This is where “spaghetti code” shows up. AI can also produce redundant code, which adds bloat and makes future changes slower and more fragile.

Traceability is another challenge. It can be difficult to understand where a piece of code came from or why it behaves a certain way, which makes audits and fixes harder. Scalability is not guaranteed either. What works for a prototype may struggle under real traffic or more complex use cases.

Use vibe coding where it fits, then reinforce it with reviews, tests, and a clear structure. When security, data handling, or scale matters, bring engineering in early.