Vibe Coding: Building Real Applications with AI
Over the past year, I’ve fundamentally changed how I approach web development. Instead of grinding through documentation and Stack Overflow threads, I’ve been “vibe coding” with Claude and monday.com—having conversational exchanges that turn ideas into working code in real-time. Monday Vibe allows you to build applications based on prompt and guidance with the AI tool — this elevates capabilities of taking ideas/data and bringing them to life with code.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding isn’t about letting AI write everything for you. It’s about treating AI as a collaborative development partner or sidekick that understands context, remembers your patterns, and helps you move from concept to implementation without the friction of traditional development workflows. Additionally using Claude Code with a mixture of archiving my code with Visual Studio — this allows me to keep track/revert on mistakes in the process. Streamlining testing/prototyping while working towards a final, working product.
When I need to build something, I just start talking through it. “I need a card layout that filters by category and stacks on scroll.” Claude knows I’m working in WordPress with Kadence, knows I prefer clean CSS over bloated libraries, and spits out something that actually looks like code I’d write. Then we go back and forth—”the mobile spacing is off,” “this needs to work with touch events,” “can we make this smoother?”—until it’s ready to push live.
Real Projects, Real Results
The Dancing With The Stars Fantasy Game
One of my biggest vibe coding projects has been Fantasy Troupe, a complete fantasy game system for Dancing With The Stars. This wasn’t a simple form—it’s a full application with player registration, live scoring, mobile-responsive dashboards, personal chat-bot, and real-time leaderboards.
Building this traditionally would have taken weeks of planning, prototyping, and debugging. With Claude, we built it iteratively over several sessions. I’d describe a feature (“I need a filterable leaderboard that updates scores”), and Claude would generate the HTML/CSS/JS structure. We’d test it, refine the mobile responsiveness, optimize the performance, and move to the next feature.
The result is a production application that thousands of users interact with throughout the DWTS season.
The Day Job Workflow
My day job at BOL involves building WordPress sites for B2B tech clients. Vibe coding has transformed how I handle these projects:
- Responsive Design Challenges: When facing complex CSS issues or mobile layout problems, I describe what’s breaking and what I need it to do. Claude generates solutions that account for my Kadence theme setup and WordPress structure.
- Custom Interactive Components: Built filterable content systems, scroll-stacking card animations, and timeline components by describing the UX I wanted rather than wrestling with JavaScript libraries.
- Rapid Prototyping: Client wants to see something new? I can build a working prototype during the meeting and iterate based on their feedback in real-time.
Monday Vibe Coding
After attending Monday.com’s Elevate conference, I’ve been rolling out Monday across our 20-person agency. The platform’s AI capabilities—Monday Magic and Monday Agents—enable a similar vibe coding approach to project management.
I can ask Monday’s AI to generate board structures, automate workflows, and create custom views without diving into tutorials. It’s the same conversational, iterative approach I use with Claude for development.
Some ways I’m using AI with Monday:
- Generating project templates optimized for web development workflows
- Creating custom automations that connect our Monday boards to client reporting
- Building dashboards that automatically surface the right information for different team roles
- Using Vibe to build status dashboards, as well as project management trackers.
The Technical Reality
Let me be clear: this isn’t magic, and AI isn’t replacing my skills as a developer. Vibe coding works because:
- I Know What I Want: I can clearly describe the problem, the desired outcome, and the technical constraints. This comes from years of development experience.
- I Can Evaluate Solutions: When Claude generates code, I understand what it’s doing, whether it’ll work in my environment, and how to modify it. I’m not copy-pasting blind.
- I Handle Integration: AI generates components, but I integrate them into existing systems, handle edge cases, and optimize for performance. That requires deep technical knowledge.
- I Debug Contextually: When something breaks, I can describe the error in context. “This works on desktop but breaks at 768px because of the Kadence header structure” gets better results than “CSS is broken.”
Why This Matters
Traditional development has a huge context-switching cost. You’re constantly moving between your code editor, documentation, Stack Overflow, testing environments, and back. Each switch breaks flow state.
Vibe coding keeps you in flow. You stay in the conversation, iterating on the problem. The AI maintains context across the entire session, remembers what you tried, and suggests refinements based on what worked and what didn’t.
For someone managing multiple personal and client projects simultaneously—marketing sites, law firm redesigns—staying in flow state is the difference between shipping and drowning in tabs.
The Future of Development
I don’t think AI will replace developers. But I do think the developers who thrive will be those who can effectively collaborate with AI—who can describe problems clearly, evaluate solutions critically, and integrate AI-generated code into production systems.
Vibe coding isn’t the future. It’s already here. The question isn’t whether to use AI in your development workflow. It’s whether you’re using it effectively enough to stay competitive.
Want to see vibe coding in action? Check out Fantasy Troupe or reach out if you want to talk about how AI is changing web development workflows.
