Vibe Coding: How I Revamped a Website Without Being a Developer (And Had Fun Doing It)

I’m not a developer. Never have been, never wanted to be. Coding? That’s for people who speak in semicolons and curly braces, right? But this week, I revamped my company’s website from the ground up—and I loved every minute of it. Turns out, “vibe coding” is a real thing, and with the right tools, anyone can join the party. Here’s how it went down, with a few lessons (and laughs) along the way.

Step 1: Building the Foundation with v0 from Vercel

I kicked things off with v0 from Vercel, a tool that lets you design and preview a website as you build it. It’s intuitive, fast, and honestly, a bit addictive. Over four days—spending just a few hours each time—I had a fully functional site with all the pages and content in place. The real-time preview was a game-changer; it felt like I was sculpting the site live.

But there was a catch. Some days, I hit a wall—not because of creativity, but because my free account ran out of messages. Pro tip: v0 doesn’t exactly advertise how many messages you get daily, so pace yourself. The kicker? One day, it told me my limit would reset on “May the 4th.” I chuckled, thinking, “May the Force be with me?” Nope, it was serious. I was grounded until then. 😅

Step 2: Switching Gears to Cursor

Message limit reached, I downloaded my code and pivoted to Cursor. First, I tried running a local LLM (deepseek-coder-v2) via Ollama, fronted by ngrok, to connect it to Cursor. Spoiler: don’t bother. It was slower than a dial-up modem and lacked the Agent mode I needed. So, I switched to Cursor’s default free trial settings—and wow, it just flowed. Need a date picker field in a form? Cursor nailed it without breaking a sweat, something v0 couldn’t quite manage (still scratching my head on that one).

Step 3: Backend Magic with Amazon Q Developer

With the frontend polished, it was time to connect the backend. My TypeScript app was destined for an Amazon S3 bucket as a static website, powered by API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Route 53, and CloudFront. Sounds like a lot, right? Enter my old pal, Amazon Q Developer. Using the CLI and “q chat,” I got step-by-step guidance on deploying it. But here’s where it got wild: the steps were overwhelming—reconfiguring forms, compiling for serverless, creating resources. So, I politely asked Amazon Q, “Can you just do it for me?”

To my shock, it did. I sipped my tea, typed “y” to approve its actions (sometimes not even reading the details), and in minutes, my site was live in production. I pinched myself to check if I was dreaming. Nope—vibe coding had officially peaked.

What I Learned About Vibe Coding

Here’s my take: vibe coding is about finding tools that click with you and bending them to your will. A few pointers:

• Know what you want. The clearer your goal, the better these tools perform.

• Be persistent. If it’s not doing what you need, tweak your approach or switch tools.

• Watch the limits. Some apps count every query as a message—don’t get caught off guard like I did on May the 4th.

• Experiment. Try a few options (v0, Cursor, Amazon Q) to find your vibe.

The best part? You don’t need to be a developer to code anymore. These tools are democratizing creation, and there’s no turning back. Whether you’re an architect, a marketer, or just someone with an idea, you can build something real. At my company, we’re all about designing training solutions—digital or otherwise—so this fits right in with our @ArchitectWithUs mission.

So, grab a tool, start vibing, and see what you can create. Who knows? You might just surprise yourself—and have a little fun while you’re at it.

#VibeCoding #ArchitectWithUs #TechForAll