Vibe Coding Broke My Brain (and gave me shingles!)

By

Rachel Daggett

What Is Vibe Coding?

At its core, vibe coding is the application of AI to software development. It’s a rapid-development methodology for transforming ideas into interactive, functional digital experiences—assessments, calculators, prototypes, microsites, dashboards, or early-stage products—in a fraction of the usual time.

It blends strategic framing, agile design, and modular code into one workflow. The goal isn’t to skip quality controls—it’s to remove the delays between inspiration and execution. Where traditional development begins with documentation and ends with delivery, vibe coding treats building as an ongoing conversation between intent and iteration.

A successful vibe-coded build begins long before anyone writes code. It starts with clarity:

  • Vision and Intent
    Define what problem you’re solving and for whom. Establish the emotional and functional outcome you want the user to experience. The more specific the intent, the more focused the build.
  • Flow Mapping
    Outline the user journey—entry point, interaction flow, feedback moments, and follow-ups—to ensure technical work aligns with audience psychology and business goals.
  • Experience Design
    Plan tone, motion, and pacing before pixel-level design. Think of this stage as “experience choreography”: how does the user move, respond, and progress?
  • Technical Strategy
    Select frameworks, data integrations, and APIs based on the desired outcome—not habit or preference. Technology should serve the story, not the other way around.
  • Build Smart
    Use modular components, reusable logic, and modern frameworks to assemble fast, reliable prototypes. Keep the code clean enough to scale later but light enough to ship quickly.
  • Iterate Continuously
    Launch the first usable version, gather data, and refine. Each release informs the next, turning live performance into the roadmap for improvement.

 

Vibe coding demands that you think like a strategist before you code like a developer. With a clear vision and flow in mind, speed becomes an asset—not chaos.

 

Why Vibe Coding?

Simply – because it’s available and it works. It’s akin to asking “why rideshare vs taxi, or why airbnb vs hotel?” Vibe coding is a useful, functional, powerful, cost effective, democratizing disruption to the way code can be written.

Vibe coding began in marketing but now extends across every function that builds, tests, or learns—product, HR, education, operations, and innovation. Its value isn’t just speed to MVP; it’s “learning velocity.”

Traditional projects spend most of their time in production and little in observation. By the time something launches, the assumptions that guided it may already be outdated. Vibe coding flips that model—launch early, learn from real data, and refine continuously. It’s like continuous integration, development and deployment in Agile, only faster and frankly, more agile!

The power of the method comes from keeping strategy, design, and engineering connected in one loop: strategy informs code, code captures data, and data drives the next iteration.

That feedback cycle creates four tangible advantages:

  • Continuous optimization. Refinement happens while the product is live.
  • Shared understanding. Technical and nontechnical teammates act from the same data and goals.
  • Operational flexibility. Content, logic, and design evolve without full rebuilds.
  • Predictive insight. Structured data reveals early indicators of engagement and intent.

 

Vibe coding gives modern teams their own agile rhythm—fast enough for today’s pace, structured enough for sustainable learning.

 

Where Power Meets Challenge (and can lead to shingles)

For all its promise, vibe coding isn’t effortless. It’s fast, flexible, and empowering—but it demands resilience and a willingness to learn.

I’m not a developer by training. My background is in marketing systems, paid media, managing WordPress and Shopify sites for a decade. The ease of modern builders made me almost forget how to write HTML and CSS.

Vibe coding forced me back into that mindset, where troubleshooting, debugging, and iteration are daily habits. I’ve broken pages, stared at error logs, and used AI agents to help me parse issues in the dev console. I’ve overwritten TXT records in hosting and killed a live site while integrating email functionality. I’ve worked days on cached browsers before realizing nothing was saving.

For perspective, and at the risk of TMI, I’ve been so immersed that a recent hiccup where I lost several days of work recently triggered the awakening of the long dormant chicken pox virus in my body. More on that in another blog if you’re interested 🙂 Just fair warning that you’ll be entering a bit of a wild west corner of emerging tech when you start vibe coding.

It’s humbling – especially when climbing the learning curve. But it’s also empowering. Because for the first time, I can build and deploy enterprise-grade tools by myself. When something breaks, I can fix it. When an idea sparks, I can test it. I’m no longer waiting on budget approval, a ticket queue or a sprint cycle.

 

A Real-World Example: The F3 Business Health Assessment

Our Business Health Assessment project shows vibe coding in action.

The goal: build a diagnostic tool that evaluates an organization’s operational performance across five key pillars and delivers tailored recommendations.

Users answer structured questions; the system applies an AI-assisted scoring model and generates a custom report highlighting strengths, opportunities, and next steps. Each participant receives an automated summary email and can schedule a 1:1 consulting session directly from the results page.

From concept to live deployment took days, not weeks. The result functions as both a lead-generation engine and a live research instrument, capturing real-time insights across industries.

The Business Health Assessment is admittedly a high-level tool, created as a way to share the efficacy of vibe coding and also helping companies think about their firms in terms of Strategy/Structure/People/Process/Tech – the five pillars on which F3 was built. And the Business Health Assessment is just the beginning of what you’ll see. It’s the first release in our upcoming AI Toolkit—a collection of specialized lightweight tools designed to help teams work smarter and faster across core marketing and growth functions.

Next in the lineup:

  • Persona Builder – Generate audience profiles with real behavioral context.
  • Battle Cards – Turn market insights into competitive positioning.
  • Brand Analyzer – Identify your brand archetype, tone, voice and messaging kit.
  • SEO Insight Tool – Reveal keyword gaps and content opportunities instantly.

Each tool follows the same vibe-coded framework: build fast, learn deeply, and refine continuously.

And for the big reveal, stay tuned for a fully featured platform solution that ties together a wide range of capabilities that solve many of the challenges our clients face every single day. It’s a solution we wish we had when we were leading sales and marketing teams.

 

Looking Forward

Vibe coding isn’t a replacement for enterprise-scale development—it’s the bridge between imagination and execution.

Our Business Health Assessment is just one example—proof that strategic framing, modern development, and iterative design can quickly merge into something powerful.

If you want to see vibe coding in action, try the live assessment. It takes five minutes, delivers a personalized report, and offers an optional consultation to explore your results and opportunities for improvement.

If you’d rather explore what vibe coding could unlock for your organization, reach out. We can audit your current process, consult on technical setup, or build alongside your team to prove what’s possible.