Vibe Coding Tips for Founders
Tips to vibe code for the right reasons and with the right techniques
You're a founder with a million-dollar idea brewing in your head. Your fingers are itching to bring it to life, but there's one tiny problem – you're not exactly what you'd call a "coder." Sure, you can navigate Shopify and maybe even wrangle some WordPress, but building something truly custom? That's where things get complicated.
Enter AI powered coding agents – the sweet spot between dragging-and-dropping widgets - and - diving headfirst into Stack Overflow rabbit holes at 2 AM (yes, SO isn’t completely obsolete even in 2025). You don’t need to become the next Linus Torvalds overnight to be able to build something. But you do need to learn just enough to get your hands dirty to make things happen without losing your sanity (or your savings account) in the process.
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Vibe Coding is surely an empowering concept.
And just to be clear, vibe coding is not the same as using AI for coding, well, mindfully. Vibe coding is when you give your AI Agents full reign to go about web searches, bug fixes, running tests, re-writing and deleting code snippets and files, etc. etc. And “forget that the code even exists” and don’t care at all about the inner workings of what goes where and why.
The need is real. We want more and more customization with each passing day and we don’t want to burden our already overoccupied brains for that. And there's something almost magical that happens when you build something with your own hands, even if it's held together with digital duct tape and good vibes.
But so many new founders have gone about it with good intentions of building something and come out of it with just frustration and increased timelines to something that could have been merely a week’s job for a skilled developer.
And there are plenty more founders who have embraced the learning journey and taken the time to build things not just with the right vibes - but also a growth mindset and a hands on approach!
As with other use cases for Generative AI, you cannot expect to throw prompts into a black hole of LLMs wrapped in intuitive UIs and expect it to give you the next Facebook overnight.
What are you building with your vibe coding subscriptions?
Before we begin understanding how to vibe code the “right” way, it is way more important to understand how to vibe code for the right purpose.
Personal Use
Think about all those tedious tasks that eat up your time. Lead outreach, social media, reading customer feedback, reading news or mailbox, reading blogs. Tasks that are mostly common in structure, but not in nuance. Sure, there are tools for everything these days. But it never feels like they do exactly what you had in mind.
Yes, you could vibe code your way through these simple tasks. But no, it generally isn't worth it for straightforward automations. Very simple reason. Such tasks require integrations with the platforms you most commonly use - gmail, google drive, outlook, slack, zoom, whatsapp. You get the idea.
There are just too many no-code drag and drop platforms out there that offer easy integrations with these platforms. n8n.io starts at 20 Euros, Zapier at $20/month, Make at around $10/month - reasonable if you're running a few key workflows. Most of these platforms provide just the right amount of customization for standard use cases, letting you tweak workflows to fit your specific needs.
But here's where it gets interesting: if your workflow needs custom logic, complex data transformations, or doesn't fit the standard templates, you'll quickly bump into platform limitations. Even more importantly, no-code platforms get expensive fast when you're processing high volumes - those per-task charges add up quickly when you're automating hundreds of leads or social media posts daily.
That's when vibe coding makes sense. One LLM subscription can power multiple custom solutions that scale with your usage without the per-execution costs. While Zapier might charge you $100+ monthly for heavy automation, your vibe-coded solution can run on the same $20 ChatGPT subscription regardless of volume. Now, if you're running a business, that $80 monthly difference might be less than pocket change compared to development time required in vibe coding. The key is honestly evaluating whether your use case is genuinely complex enough - or high-volume enough - to warrant the extra effort, while factoring in your absolute cost constraints.
For tips on how to use coding agents, keep reading the next sections.
Demos. Show. Don’t Tell.
A working demo – even a rough one that sometimes works sometimes just gives up – can be worth a thousand pitch decks. Demos serve three crucial audiences: potential customers who need to see it to believe it, investors who want proof you can execute, and developers who need to understand the vision before they can build it properly.
The best demos feel effortless but represent hours of thoughtful work. They're not about showcasing perfect code – they're about showcasing perfect understanding of the problem you're solving. Users don't care if your backend is held together with API calls and prayers. They care about whether your solution makes their life better.
Some tips:
Don’t try to build everything at once. Start small. One feature first. And then keep adding, while auto-testing if the previous features still work. Coding agents have a tendency to ruin their own creations when things get a bit heavy.
Learn some versioning basics. Use Github MCP tools, features. Understand just 4 basic git concepts/commands - to create a new repo, to connect your local code to your repo, to pull changes, to push your changes. This can vary depending on your chosen AI Coding Agent, so spend some time reading the versioning docs. Checkpoint it when something works.
Build the UI first. Describe it in detail and keep it simple. A clean, simple interface beats a beautiful, confusing one every time. You can always ask it to prettify things later on. But get things working first. Focus on functionality. If given the liberty, agents can keep adding features that no one asked for, hiding the ones that you actually cared about.
Use dummy data. Use dummy data instead of getting into an abyss of database management and data ingestion pipelines. If those terms sound scary, they would haunt you even more when you’re dealing with constant demo requests and feedback incorporation. And Supabase does not magically solve all problems. You have been warned :D
Shell out more money. If you’re price insensitive, you can try out the SOTA (state of the art) coding model - Claude 4 Opus. A lot of users report better UI and less bugs with these models. But it can still be a hit or miss for different use cases. It’s always best to test small and then may be use cheaper models to build up from the basic architecture.
Don’t get attached. There will come a time, when you would need to let your developers completely kill your demo and re-build from scratch :D
But on a more serious note, quick demos are built to be discarded and re-built from scratch, keeping the feedback and scaling needs in mind.
A working MVP with actual users
You've validated the concept, demo'd the solution, and now you need something that real users can actually use. Not forever – just long enough to prove there's a real business here.
The MVP phase is a delicate balance. Build too little, and you won't learn what you need to learn from real users. Build too much, and you'll waste months on features nobody wants. Your MVP isn't a product – it's an experiment. Every feature should answer a specific question about user behavior or market demand. Start with the absolute minimum viable experience. One user type, one core workflow, one primary outcome. Add complexity only when the simple version proves its worth.
You can still follow the tips from the previous section (other than the dummy data one, obviously), but here are some additional considerations:
Aim to understand the overall working of the MVP. Ask basic questions. Use AI Agents as your learning + coding partner. Ask AI how it plans to build your MVP. Work through the architecture with your AI to make critical decisions like - what libraries or frameworks to use, pros and cons of each.
Build “pieces” that you can ask the agent to re-use. In UI, that can take the form of buttons, search bars etc. In backend, it could be rate limiting, functionality to send an email.
Refine your requirements, ask AI to rate your requirements in complexity and only build the simpler ones first. Do not assume AI can vibe code anything and everything. Treat it like an intern. When in doubt, start with simpler requirements so as not to overwhelm your AI intern on the very first day :)
Define your own high level tests. Ask AI to build these tests. But do not rely solely on them. Keep a “test set” hidden to make sure AI is not cheating its way to pass your defined tests. These could be manual test using different inputs in your application.
Keep software security in mind. While it might not be enough, it still is a good thing that most coding agents are defining secure coding practices and prompts to check if these are being followed. Follow them for your web app too - replit, lovable.
Track progress. If you see the agent pondering on the same bug for more than an hour, it most likely has already made things worse. Stop the agent, go back to the last working checkpoint and ask it to summarise the issue and what has been tried till now.
Use models with larger context window (GPT 4.1 or Gemini 2.5 pro) while fixing bugs or trying to work on something that needs access to code across multiple functinalities. !!! But do keep your costs in check !!!
Use Google Search/ Stack Overflow / Specific Library/Framework Documentation if your vibes are unable to fix your bugs anymore. Find out if others are facing the same problem and what has worked for them. Look for proof, do not assume your AI chatbot can always help you with these searches.
Verify what your MCPs are doing before accepting. Even more so while deleting something. It can be very tempting to just do it via the agent, I’ve been there too. But trust me, use the manual mode when real data/users are at stake.
When confused, ask coding agents to explain some concepts in use for the errored out code in question.
Stop posting software engineering is dead on social media and befriend some real human developers and ask for advice and help when you’re stuck :)
In effect, all these tips point to just one core idea - using coding agents is a skill, that has to be practised. The more you try to understand how to work with these agents, the more you’d appreciate it. But if you needed something that would read your vibes and produce code - that isn’t happening anytime soon.
Think big. Start small. Learn constantly. That's the only right vibe for vibe coding.
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If you’re new to this blog - welcome! I’m Snigdha, an AI developer who has developed and led AI product development at startups (early stage and nearing IPOs) and enterprises.
On this blog, I'll be sharing insights on AI product development for leaders - most of which result from AI projects and consultations with my clients at MindChords.AI.
Read more about why I started this blog - the inspiration and mission behind NextWorldTrio