The Rise of Vibe-Coding for Non-Developers

Lately, there’s been considerable excitement surrounding "vibe coding" platforms for non-developers - tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit - that let anyone build websites simply by describing their ideas in a plain English chat box. If you've been following startup or tech circles, you've probably heard bold claims about these tools revolutionizing web development, including the end of big SaaS companies, with tons of people posting a fun little game mimicking Flappy Birds after giving just a one-sentence description.

While the technology is promising, the truth is a bit more complicated.

The Natural Evolution of No-Code

Non-Developer Vibe Coding (NDVC) feels like the evolution of no-code website builders like Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, and Bubble. Historically, these platforms allowed users to create websites without needing programming skills, instead letting them drag and drop interfaces and create workflows using visual tools.

Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and others promise to dramatically simplify this process: write your vision in natural language, and the tool instantly generates a (mostly) functional site, complete with good-quality content.

As an example, I used Bolt to quickly build the site https://casecraft.app, a landing page designed to explore interest in automated case study generation linked to a Typeform. The process was shockingly fast: it took just 30 minutes to build a polished and highly functional site, far surpassing anything I could have built manually. I spent far more time configuring Typeform itself than building the actual site.

The Myth of One-Shot Success and Hitting The Vibe Ceiling

Creating basic prototypes or landing pages is incredibly simple, but significant hurdles remain before these platforms can reliably support production-grade applications.

We’ve all seen social media posts of people claiming they created a new game in one line of code. While this can happen, it’s more often the exception than the rule. Most NDVC users I spoke with got a decent first draft from one prompt but required hours of back-and-forth to refine the content and design. The little things start adding up. The vibe coding software tools often create links to pages that have not yet been created, or content that is fragile and does not work well on multiple browsers, dark/light mode, or mobile browsers. The more complicated the app, the more time it takes.

The bigger hurdle is hitting the “Vibe Ceiling." Once people begin building more complicated sites or logic, the vibe coding engines invariably get stuck. They often falsely claim they’ve solved a problem when they haven’t, or they fix one issue and break others in an endless game of coding whack-a-mole.

The cycle usually involves the prompter repeatedly telling the AI, "It’s still broken!" with the AI replying, "So sorry! You’re right, it is still broken, but I’ve now fixed it!" After 8–10 cycles of this, the non-developer either gives up or calls in a developer (DVC). At that point, the code has often become so tangled that the developer suggests starting over.

Other Limitations of NDVC

Besides the Vibe Ceiling, there are other limitations that prevent these platforms from scaling to production-grade apps. Most of these platforms have made a design decision to emphasize speed of developing an amazing site over comprehensiveness. You get the “wow” experience of having a site up quickly, but miss out on a lot of the nuts and bolts needed in production-quality code. Here’s a subset of issues that Vibe Developer Coded sites have right now:

Security Risks

Most vibe coding sites today use distributed Postgres tools like Supabase (a distributed PostgreSQL service) to handle databases and connect via the client. However, these connections often start off with security holes, and configuring them properly is difficult for non-developers. I built a tool to check security for vibe-coded sites and was able to access sensitive data on three out of six randomly selected sites, including one that gave me email addresses and order details for all of their customers (which I reported to the owner to be fixed).

Prompt Injection & Token Exploitation

Vibe-coded tools that use AI in their apps can often be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks (and in some cases might disclose their API secrets), which can then be used to charge AI usage on their behalf. Most people vibe coding are not thinking about nor prompting to close these holes, and usually the holes are not completely closed. Also, some of these platforms build with only client-side validation, which means a clever hacker can get around those restrictions and corrupt a database by making requests directly to the server.

SEO Gaps

In order to get the sites out quickly, they often are not optimized for search results. My site-checking tool also checked SEO across several vibe-coded sites and found that most lacked basic optimizations like meta tags and static H1 headers, since these elements were hidden in dynamic JavaScript. The platforms are getting better at this - and yes, Google does check JavaScript now - but a lot more can be done.

Broken Links and Pages

As mentioned above, in their haste to create a full application quickly, vibe-created sites can start off with links to pages that don’t exist (like Privacy and Terms). It is totally fine that these are created, but the user is often never told these links are broken and need to be added.

Scalability & Validation

Many of the non-simple vibe-coded sites are not designed to survive material real-world traffic or complex logic. They may work under small loads but will crash and likely need to be redesigned if they reach any scale.

The platforms will get better at solving these issues, but because of these limitations, most non-developers should limit these platforms today to prototyping tools or simple sites.

Despite these issues, vibe coding today has huge benefits.

Vibe Coding and the era of Prototypia

As I’ve told friends, we are entering an era I call "Prototypia." It’s incredibly easy for non-developers (NDVC) to whip up and test working prototypes. While these may not be production-ready, they are good enough to validate ideas quickly before handing them off to developers for refinement.

Vibe coding also makes it easy for non-developers to build simple websites for small businesses, like personal consulting pages or local shops. What used to take a day of configuring links and content now takes just 30 minutes.

Microsoft Access Revisited

Vibe coding feels like the reincarnation of Microsoft Access. Back in the ’90s and 2000s, Access allowed non-developers to build forms, workflows, and UIs around relational databases. It was widely used in businesses for internal tools, often resulting in convoluted applications that developers had to fix later.

Vibe coding feels like the modern version of this. Non-developers (NDVC) will use these platforms to build internal tools until they hit the vibe ceiling and need real coding expertise. (Fun fact: In one of my first internships, I improved the performance of a Microsoft Access report from several hours to just seconds - a 50x improvement.)

The Future of Vibe Coding

We are still in the early innings of vibe coding, and much will change in the coming years.

Proprietary Libraries and Locked-In Functionality

Platforms like Bolt and Lovable will introduce proprietary libraries for authentication, security, payments, and more. These will be designed for reliability and consistency, funneling users toward default solutions that address common issues while locking them into the platform’s ecosystem (and pricing). Users who use these libraries will get instant reliability and security in exchange for being stuck on the platform.

Let a Thousand Small Flowers Bloom

We’ll see an explosion of low-quality, rapidly built applications. Users might believe they can recreate platforms like Salesforce or Slack, only to hit hidden complexity. I experienced this myself when building Yip Yap, a community app resembling Slack and Reddit. While I built core functionality in weeks, it took many months to get all of the small features expected (reactions, notifications, replies, mentions, list of who gave reactions, GIF support, just to name a few...).

Still, this explosion of creativity is exciting, much like when Photoshop democratized graphic design.

On-Premise, Open-Sourced Vibe Coding

Enterprises will want secure, on-premise solutions. I expect open-source versions of vibe coding platforms to emerge, combined with on-premise large language models. Consulting firms and integrators will offer integration, deployment, and user training of these tools, linking them to private databases. It will be Microsoft Access on turbocharge.

Longer-Term: Instant Duplication?

If AI code generation advances enough, I expect platforms that will offer "instant duplication" features, capable of cloning existing websites simply by scraping URLs and mimicking user interactions, even logging in to authenticated areas. While imperfect, these could dramatically lower the perceived value of custom-built software and foster a DIY culture.

Picks and Shovels: The Ecosystem Opportunity

As these platforms grow, so will the ecosystem around them. Expect new services for vibe-app-specific discovery sites and directories, SEO and security optimization, integration frameworks, training courses and videos, and LLM-instruction-based integrations (i.e., instead of instructions on how to integrate code, they provide a prompt to give to vibe-coding LLMs).

It's Going to Be Fun

Vibe coding sites for non-developers (NDVC) are truly game-changing. They dramatically lower barriers to experimentation, validating ideas, and building simple applications. For now, complex, secure, and scalable software still requires professional developers, but over time, many of those barriers should fall.

These are exciting times.

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About Charlie Graham

Over the past year, I’ve been fully living in the AI-rena—building AI-products at warp speed with tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and watching the space evolve daily. I’ve used these tools to (in the last 6 months) develop:

• 📞  TellMel.ai: Mel turns your family's cherished memories into beautifully written stories through meaningful telephone conversations with you and your loved ones. (Definitely worth using!)
• 🧠 Betsee.xyz: a prediction market aggregator that can tell you prediction markets based on tweets. Forward any tweet to @betseethis to try it.
• 💬 YipYap.xyz: a thread-based community chat app
• 📔 casecraft.app: Beautiful customer case studies/success stories in days Not months
• And more coming soon...

As I build and grow these products, I've been sharing my experiences. Subscribe or follow me on X at @imcharliegraham or on Substack