Vibe coding is where you come up with apps, whether they’re web, or mobile, just using normal English language commands. Frankly, I think it works best when you already have a coding background (turbo-charging your expertise), but if you need to brief something to a more tech-type person, vibe coding can get you to a pretty good prototype.

There are a bunch of tools available, from ones capable of producing full, production-ready apps (Windsurf, Cursor, Claude Code) to ones that come up with simple prototypes and MVPs (Lovable, Google AI Studio, Claude).

I’m culling the list pretty brutally here but these are ones you might have heard of. Especially Windsurf, which made headlines in the middle of last year by getting into a multi-billion dollar licensing deal with Google that basically moved all the company’s top talent to Google. Then the rest of the company was bought by Cognition.

I’m not going to be looking at any of the top end ones today as they involve paid accounts, APIs, Auth codes and all sorts of other things I’m really not qualified to do anything other than goggle at.

What I am going to be playing with is Google AI Studio, and Claude – the normal LLM, not Claude Code – as they’re both pretty good for getting a feel of the whole vibe code game, and they’re free to use. Also, the company I work for has it’s own, internal, vibe coding platform, built off Claude Code, so I’m fairly familiar with how that one works.

Starting with Claude, here’s a prompt I put into it to build a simple quiz: Can you create a quiz that tells people their likely top 5 clifton strengths?

As you can see, a very in-depth and technical prompt.

What it did was give me a planned output: I’ll create an interactive quiz that estimates someone’s top 5 CliftonStrengths based on their responses. This will be a simplified version that captures the essence of the 34 themes through scenario-based questions.

And then it started coding (this bit takes a while) – and yes, it can and will check and fix its own bugs. Or you copy the error message into the chat and off it goes again.

And gave me this:

Which I can then choose to download as a TSX file, or publish – to make it available to anyone on the internet. I’m not going to be doing that as Clifton Strengths is a proprietary personality profile assessment, (obviously with a fair bit of freely available info on it around the web) and I’d rather not court trouble.

I’ve also used this to create a journal app that is able to analyse diary entries for mood and theme, but I had to use Google AI Studio to come up with one that also creates a picture to summarise the themes of the entry (gotta love nano banana integrations). The biggest issues with this on both platforms was finding a way to securely store the journal entries (and pictures) between sessions. I’m still not quite there.

Where I’ve had the most fun, though, is in vibe coding silly, funny little games. I asked Google AI Studio to: Create a world class, in-browser, match-3 type game with a witchy, cottage-core vibe where the ingredients you match go into creating potions to treat fantastical customers with various strange ailments

In-browser means it’s not trying to code up on a separate platform with permissions and databases and things, so a much simpler build. No idea if the ‘world class’ thing made any difference but figured it was worth a try.

I added some other elements along the way, such as silly potion names and a Brew Potion animation. It’s best to add these one at a time, and check things are still doing what you expect after each iteration.

Is it perfect? Definitely not, it’s buggy, and clunky and purple (because Generative AI loves purple for some reason).

Is it playable? Yes, and I’ve spent far too much time brewing up silly potions for goofy customers. Highly recommended!

In terms of publishing this one – I’d need to deploy it to a Google Cloud project, which means $$, so I haven’t.

Have a go, have fun, but don’t expect to produce the next Candy Crush over the weekend (yet). Let me know what you build!