What is Vibe Coding

In a sentence, vibe coding is the practice of writing software by describing what you want in natural language and letting AI handle much of the actual coding.

People can now simply state their intent, and AI tools generate the necessary code, suggest improvements, and even debug errors. Rather than focusing on syntax and manual problem-solving, vibe coding is about iteratively prompting an AI assistant—such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or Cursor—to generate, refine, and troubleshoot code. As AI expert Andrej Karpathy (the person who created the term “vibe coding”) put it: “It’s not really coding—I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

So, as the AI space has grown and AI-powered coding assistants have become more widely available and powerful, more and more people have been embracing vibe coding. Experienced developers are now able to automate repetitive tasks and speed up development, while non-technical people have a lower barrier to entry if they want to explore creating something on their own.

People can now simply state their intent, and AI tools generate the necessary code, suggest improvements, and even debug errors.

How is Vibe Coding Impacting Small Businesses

But, what does vibe coding have to do with your small business? Well, let’s look at some use cases:

Automation

Let’s say you run an ecommerce online store and you spend hours on inventory management. With vibe coding, you could automate inventory updates without needing advanced technical skills. For example, you could ask an AI coding tool to create a script that automatically updates my inventory in Google Sheets when a product is sold in my online store, and the AI would generate the necessary code to pull sales data and adjust stock levels in real time.

Customer Experience

Another use case is around customer experience. If you run a small business that offers online services, you could use vibe coding to create a chatbot for your website that helps answer questions about those services. Then, the AI-coding tool could help you integrate the chatbot with your existing website. Once built and integrated, your business can offer responsive customer support without manual intervention.

Data Analysis

Your small business has its customer and sales data in a database. The database can be queried using SQL, but you aren’t an expert in SQL. That’s when you could turn to vibe coding. You could tell the AI-coding assistant, “Show me the total sales for each product in the last three months, sorted from highest to lowest”, and the tool could return the SQL query needed to pull that data.

Integrations

Do you use various tools in your small business to keep everything running smoothly? Like, CRMs, email marketing tools, and invoicing software? With vibe coding, a business owner can describe an automation, such as: “Sync new email subscribers from my email marketing tool to my CRM and send a welcome email,” and have AI generate the necessary code.

Challenges of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is a great way for you to get your technical toes wet if you’re a small business owner who wants to automate processes or make incremental improvements to your online store. But how far can this practice take you, and what challenges may you face?

Prompt Engineering

If you’re new to prompting an AI tool, you may find that describing what you need in natural language is intuitive, but getting precise and functional results is not as easy. This requires testing outputs and troubleshooting when things don’t work as expected. And, if you don’t have a foundational understanding of programming concepts, this could lead to inefficient or incorrect implementations.

Complex Solutions

Sure, vibe coding helped you write a basic SQL script that worked, but what if you need more advanced data analysis? AI-generated SQL may pull incorrect data, miss edge cases, or be slow when querying large datasets. The same thing could happen with the chatbot. It may be able to handle simple customer inquiries, but then it may struggle with nuanced customer interactions. Similarly, duplicate orders, refunds, or other issues could break your vibe-coded script for automatically updating inventory. In these cases, what do you do?

Calling in an Expert

After you’ve gone as far as you can on your own with vibe coding, you’re left with scripts to help you automate some straightforward tasks and you have a site that offers better customer experience, but you know you haven’t reached the final solution. There are more upgrades you can make and improvements that can be made to the vibe-generated code you have. You’re just not sure how to take what you’ve started to the next level?

One solution is to partner with a software development team.

Troubleshooting and Optimization

If the AI-generated code doesn’t function as expected – let’s say it doesn’t sync data properly in an automation task – a development team can dive into the underlying code, troubleshoot these issues, and optimize the solution. They would ensure the code is free of errors, enhance its efficiency, and refactor it to handle more complex or edge-case situations, something AI might miss.

Customization

Vibe coding may produce a rather generic solution. But if you need something that aligns with your unique business needs, a development team can fine-tune the code to reflect the specific nuances of your business. For example, a business may need a chatbot to handle specific queries related to their services or require an automation that accommodates their particular inventory process. Developers can modify the code to meet these needs and integrate additional features that the AI assistant might not have anticipated.

Scalability

A development team can also help with scaling an existing vibe-coded solution. For instance, your vibe-coded integration may successfully handle a small volume of data, but it could fail under higher usage or expose the business to security vulnerabilities. A development team can optimize the system architecture, ensuring that it can scale smoothly as the business grows and implement necessary security measures, such as data encryption and access controls.

Maintenance

As a small business owner, you’ll always have a lot on your plate. Maintaining AI-generated code does not need to be one of them. A development team can take over the long-term upkeep of AI-generated solutions, ensuring that they continue to function as intended and remain compatible with updates to business systems or external tools.

Conclusion

So, now we’ve covered what vibe coding is, how it can be used in your small business, and the challenges you may face when using it. Use the information provided in this article to decide whether now is the time to get started with this practice. And if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask!