For non-technical people, vibe coding is opening doors.
When vibe coding took off earlier this year, many saw it as the domain of developers tinkering with tools. For a growing number of non-technical people, it’s become a way to finally bring an idea to life, improve their work processes, or carve out a creative side hustle.
Four people told Business Insider how they built their apps after hours of work and parenting, and the lessons they learned along the way.
The product designer who vibe coded a dog ID app
Carolyn Fong for BI
Cynthia Chen, a product designer, had dreamed for years of an app to catalogue dogs spotted.
In her free time over about two months, she built Dog-e-dex: an iOS app that lets users snap pictures of dogs, identify the breed, and save their profiles.
The San Francisco-based designer with no formal engineering training had turned to platforms like Replit, ChatGPT, and Cursor. It wasn’t until she discovered Anthropic’s Claude in January that things started to click.
She copied the code generated from Claude into Xcode — a tool for building apps on Apple devices — even when she didn’t fully understand how it worked. “It was like magic,” she said.
“Every time I pressed the preview button, it was an exciting little gift opening,” she added.
Chen said people who want to vibe code should treat prompting AI like “gentle parenting.”
Carolyn Fong for BI
“You have to be very intentional, very specific, and I think you have to be very nice,” she said.
Sometimes, AI needs to be “babied,” she said. When Claude got stuck, she broke down instructions step-by-step until it understood.
The mother who built an app to help others emotionally reset
When Karima Williams felt herself spiraling emotionally, she turned to Claude, which she said helped her process emotions she wasn’t ready to share with others.
The 34-year-old mother from Maryland told Business Insider that talking to AI also helped her become a better parent. AI was her reset button, helping her decompress before stepping into mom mode.
Seeing how useful Claude was for her own venting, Williams vibe coded a web app to help people offload and regulate their emotions.
What worked was telling Claude to talk to her like she’s 10 or 15 years old, Williams said. As she didn’t know how to structure a product or set up a backend, Claude would walk her through what needed to be done.
“I also tell it to tell me one thing at a time, because it can be overwhelming,” she added.
Williams also said speaking to AI worked better than typing.
“It makes it 10,000 times easier for me to say what I need to say and then get the context out,” she said, adding that she dictates to AI about 90% of the time.
The accountant who vibe codes after his kids are in bed
Amrita Chandras for BI
For more than 18 years, Wei Khjan Chan worked as an accountant, a profession often considered vulnerable to automation.
To stay ahead of the curve and make a bigger impact in his field, the audit partner at an accounting and advisory firm in Malaysia picked up vibe coding after attending coding workshops in June.
“It’ll be great if I get to know AI earlier. At least I replace myself rather than let other people replace me,” the 39-year-old told Business Insider.
Chan built a web app to speed up filing expense claims after business trips. Using AI-powered optical character recognition, it scans receipts and automatically exports them into the right files for his company’s finance teams.
He also used AI to automate his workflow, such as generating invoices. “Without the vibe coding tools and the skill set, an accountant is unable to do this,” he said.
Chan said that when he first started experimenting with AI, he was advised to write long, detailed prompts. But experience taught him that smaller, iterative steps work better.
“The initial prompt is very important to set everything right,” he said. After that, when changes are needed, it’s more effective to adjust one small part at a time instead of piling on an entire wish list.
Amrita Chandras for BI
For debugging, Chan watches if the error message changes — a sign that the AI is working through the issue. If the same error persists, he resets the chat and reframes the request with fresh examples.
Chan also said vibe coding doesn’t require endless hours of grinding. The father of two usually vibe codes after his kids go to bed, adding a feature here or refining a function there. Over time, it builds up, and the pieces eventually come together.
“It’s like playing a game,” he said.
The HR professional who said AI acts like a ‘young, over-enthusiastic intern’
Laura Zaccaria, a Singapore-based HR professional, taught herself to build an AI-assisted web app while on maternity leave.
The new mom signed up for a coding class in June and created a family meal planner.
She vibe coded mostly in the evenings or when her baby was napping. On weekends, her husband took care of the baby while she worked.
Zaccaria told Business Insider that learning vibe coding gave her confidence she could keep evolving as both a mother and a professional.
When she was vibe coding, Zaccaria said she sometimes got stuck in a loop. AI can be like a young, over-enthusiastic intern, she added.
“You need to know when to pause and ask yourself: Where was I not clear?” she said. “Sometimes it’s OK to scrap the whole conversation and start afresh.”
“I realized I hadn’t phrased things properly, or I had asked for something too big. Then I’d have to break it down again,” she added.
Do you have a story to share about vibe coding? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.
