What is vibe coding? Understanding the new way to build applications

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In February 2025, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy — co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla — coined a term that would reshape how people build software.

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."

The idea took off fast. Within weeks, vibe coding had become shorthand for a brand-new way of building digital products: describe what you want in plain English, let AI write the code, and steer the result with feedback instead of typing.

Now, more than a year later, vibe coding has gone from a viral tweet to an entire movement. Founders are launching MVPs in an afternoon. Small business owners are creating working websites without ever opening a code editor. And the underlying AI models, like Claude (from Anthropic), GPT-4/5 (from OpenAI), and Gemini (from Google), keep getting more capable with every update.

The best part is, you don't need any technical background to start. With GoDaddy Airo AI Builder, the same vibe-coding power is built into a complete small-business platform so you can go from idea to live, professional website in minutes.

Let's break down what vibe coding is, how it works, and how to put it to work for your business today.

Where vibe coding came from

Karpathy's original post described a workflow he'd been using for personal projects. He would provide ideas to an AI, accept whatever it produced, and iterate by feel rather than reading every line of code. What made the term stick was the recognition that AI had finally crossed a threshold; it was good enough that you could trust the vibes and ship working software.

The implications for entrepreneurs are huge. The wall between "having an idea" and "having a working product" used to be months of learning to code or thousands of dollars hiring a developer. Vibe coding tears that wall down.

For small businesses, that means you can prototype a booking site, an online store, or a portfolio in the time it used to take just to plan one. Airo brings that same speed to your entire web presence.

Key features of vibe coding

Here’s a closer look at how vibe coding differs from older approaches:

Conversational, not technical

In vibe coding, the interaction feels more like a conversation than programming. You use prompts and feedback to guide the AI, and the tool turns those instructions into concrete results, such as new pages, new features, or fixed bugs.

This is what makes it accessible to people who don't know JavaScript or Python. You don't need to learn syntax; you just need to describe what you want clearly.

It still produces real, ownable assets

Unlike rigid template builders, vibe coding produces real outputs you can edit, customize, and grow into. Whether that's an app generated by an AI assistant or a complete business website generated by Airo, you walk away with something genuinely yours, not something trapped inside a closed platform.

Flexibility for developers and entrepreneurs

Vibe coding is like a turbocharged copilot for developers. It speeds up repetitive tasks, drafts boilerplate, and suggests alternatives.

For entrepreneurs, it lets you build a working product without hiring a development team on day one. You describe your business, and AI handles the build while you focus on customers, sales, and growth.

How does vibe coding work?

A typical vibe coding session looks like this:

1. Set a goal in plain English. For example: "Build me a website for my candle business that sells products and captures emails."
2. Let the AI plan and build. It chooses the structure, generates the pages, writes the copy, and assembles the design.
3. Preview it. Most modern vibe coding experiences (and Airo) show you a live preview within seconds.
4. Steer with natural language. You can do this using prompts like, "Make the headline more playful. Add a contact form. Use warmer colors."
5. Publish. 

The result is a working product built without ever writing a single line of code yourself.

The technology behind vibe coding

Vibe coding is the result of large language models (LLMs) becoming sophisticated enough to build working software from natural-language prompts. Some of the most common LLMs used for vibe coding include:

• Claude (from Anthropic): Known for strong reasoning and handling long, complex tasks, making it a popular choice for coding projects, detailed analysis, and working with large amounts of information.
• GPT-4 and GPT-5 (from OpenAI): The models that kicked off the modern AI boom. They’re widely used for writing, coding, brainstorming, and general-purpose AI assistance.
• Gemini (from Google): Google's flagship multimodal AI, designed to work across text, images, audio, and video.

These models aren’t simply autocompleting code anymore. They can now understand intent, plan multi-step tasks, debug their own mistakes, and produce real, functional results. When combined with file access, live previews, and deployment infrastructure, they’re the engine that powers every vibe coding experience.

Many developer-focused workflows still rely on classic tools like VS Code and GitHub for version control and collaboration, but that level of complexity is overkill for many small businesses. 

Advantages of using vibe coding

Used in the right situations, vibe coding can help businesses of every size move faster and accomplish more.

Time and cost savings

With vibe coding, much of the setup, design, and boilerplate is generated by AI. Weeks of work can be reduced to a few short prompts, which trims costs and dramatically accelerates ROI. For a solo founder, that can mean launching a complete online business for the price of a domain instead of the cost of a contract developer.

Big potential for small businesses and startups

For small businesses and startups, validating an idea quickly can be the difference between growing and stalling. Vibe coding lets you describe what you want, see a working version almost instantly, and refine it based on real customer feedback.

Stronger collaboration across teams

Because vibe coding uses natural language, anyone on a team can propose changes and draft updates themselves. That removes bottlenecks, aligns goals from the start, and lets your business move at the speed of ideas.

Vibe coding with GoDaddy Airo

Most vibe coding experiences are built for developers. They hand you a codebase, leave hosting and infrastructure to you, and assume you know how to deploy, secure, and grow what you've built.

That's not what entrepreneurs need. If you're starting a business, you don't want a codebase. You want a finished, professional website wired up to everything you actually need to operate: hosting, security, payments, email, marketing, and SEO.

GoDaddy Airo AI Builder caters to these needs. It brings the speed and flow-state of vibe coding to small business owners by removing the technical overhead of managing code, servers, or multiple third-party tools.

With just a few plain-language prompts about your business, Airo generates:

• A complete website with on-brand copy, layout, and visuals tailored to your industry
• Logo options and matching social media handles
• Suggested social posts, ad copy, and email templates so your whole launch feels cohesive
• Built-in essentials: mobile-responsive design, SEO, SSL, professional email, payments, live chat, and a marketing calendar

You can fine-tune the details just like any vibe coding workflow, including tone (confident, playful, premium), audience (locals, online shoppers, B2B), and goals (calls, bookings, purchases), and refine based on what you see, not what you think you "should" do.

Things to keep in mind

Vibe coding is powerful, but like any tool, it works best with a few guardrails. Here are some quick tips:

• Be specific in your prompts. Clear goals produce clear results.
• Review what you ship. Take a moment to read your copy, click your buttons, and test your forms before publishing.
• Match the tool to the goal. Lightweight prototypes, MVPs, landing pages, and small-business websites are where vibe coding is most effective.
• Lean on platforms that handle the hard parts. Security, hosting, SEO, and payments are easy to overlook when you're focused on building. Choosing an all-in-one solution like Airo means those essentials are baked in from day one, so you can stay focused on growing your business.

Is vibe coding the solution for everyone?

Vibe coding is a great fit for most people building most things, especially small business owners, solo founders, creators, and teams that want to move fast. However, there are a few situations where traditional development may still be the best option.

What types of projects is it ideal for?

Vibe coding is perfect for:

• Small business websites: Services, portfolios, local businesses
• Online stores: Selling products, services, or digital goods
• Booking and appointments sites: For stylists, trainers, tutors, consultants, and other service-based businesses
• Landing pages and lead-capture sites: For campaigns, launches, and promotions
• MVPs and prototypes: For testing an idea before investing further
• Internal tools, dashboards, AskExplain, and side projects: Personal productivity or team workflows

For all of these, vibe coding lets you validate the market, iterate with real users, and adjust scope without committing months of effort. Airo covers the full small-business slice of that list right out of the box. 

When might traditional development be a better choice?

Traditional development still makes sense for highly specialized software. This includes things like proprietary financial systems, healthcare platforms with strict compliance requirements, or large-scale custom applications with unique architectural needs.

But for the vast majority of what small businesses actually need, vibe coding is the faster, smarter, and more affordable path.

Unlock the benefits of vibe coding for your business

Vibe coding is the fastest path from idea to launched product that the internet has ever seen. What used to require months of work, a development team, or thousands of dollars now takes a few well-crafted prompts and a clear vision.

This is a huge opportunity for small business owners. You can have a complete, professional online presence, including website, branding, marketing, payments, and email, live by tonight.

The easiest way to put vibe coding to work for your business is also the most complete one.

With GoDaddy Airo AI Builder, you can register your domain, describe your business, and watch your full online presence come to life in minutes. 

Your idea deserves to be a real business. Vibe coding is how you get it there — fast.

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