Vibe Coding Looked Easy Online. Here's What It Actually Takes.

I want to gently push back on the vibe coding content you've probably seen online.

The videos make it look magical. Someone opens Cursor or Claude, types a quick description of an app, and watches a fully functional product materialize in real time. Twenty minutes. Done. Ship it.

That's not what happened when I tried it.

I spent three months in what I'd describe as productive frustration. Sometimes sessions went great — I'd ship something real in an hour or two. Other times, I'd spend an afternoon fighting with AI output that was always almost-right but never quite. The gap between those sessions felt random.

It wasn't random. I just hadn't found the pattern yet.

The thing the videos don't show you

The viral twenty-minute builds have one thing in common that nobody talks about: before the creator hit record, they already knew exactly what they were building.

They knew the specific feature. The exact inputs and outputs. What the UI would look like. What data it would touch. What success meant.

The sessions that worked for me were the ones where I showed up with that same clarity. The sessions that failed were the ones where I had a vague idea and asked the AI to figure out the rest.

Vibe coding is real. It works. But the "vibe" is not the absence of thinking — it's what happens when you've done the thinking and can flow through the build because you know where you're going.

Five questions I answer before every session

I used to open Cursor and just start. Now I take five minutes before I type anything and answer these:

What exactly am I building? Not "a settings page" — but "a form at /settings/profile that lets users update their display name and bio, connected to the profiles table in Supabase with RLS policies already in place." Specific enough that I could hand it to a junior developer and they'd know what to do.

What's my stack? Cursor can see my files, but it doesn't know what I want to use. "I'm on Next.js 14 App Router, Supabase, and Tailwind CSS" takes ten seconds and prevents a lot of unwanted decisions.

What do I already have? If auth is built, I say so: "Auth is set up with Supabase Auth, session available via the useSession hook in lib/auth.ts." This stops the AI from rebuilding things that exist.

What should it not do? Two rules I use almost every time: "don't install any packages without asking first" and "only modify the files I mention." Without these, Cursor will helpfully touch code you didn't intend to change.

What does success look like? "I can update my display name, click save, and see the change when I refresh the page." Specific and testable. When I define success upfront, I can tell immediately whether the output hit the mark.

What changed when I started doing this

The gap between good sessions and bad ones nearly closed. Not because Cursor got better — because I stopped showing up unprepared.

The "effortless" builds you see online aren't actually effortless. The thinking happened before the recording started. Once I started doing that thinking explicitly, my results started looking a lot more like the videos.

If you want a shortcut to the thinking part, Briefli is an AI that interviews you before you build and writes the structured prompt for you. But honestly, even just writing down five bullet points before you start will change your results.

Try it on your next session and see.