Quick definition first, because the term gets thrown around a lot. Vibe coding is when you describe what you want in plain English, and an AI builds it for you. You're not writing code. You're describing the thing — pages, buttons, what happens when someone clicks — and the AI handles the actual coding underneath.

It's the same energy as telling a designer "I want a clean homepage with a hero and three feature cards" — except the AI also writes the working app behind it. You stay in the driver's seat on what you want. The AI takes care of the "how do I build this" part.

There are three tools most people start with. The framework on this page works for all three — pick whichever feels right for where you're at:

There are technically four steps, because there's a Step 0 that nobody tells you about and it's the difference between an app that works and an app that falls apart.

If you've tried this once and it didn't work, your app probably died because of one (or more) of these. None of them are obvious until you've felt the pain.

• One-shotting the whole app in a single prompt The "build me a full booking app for personal trainers" prompt. Feels efficient. Isn't. You can't debug what you don't understand — and one-shot apps always have something subtly broken you can't pinpoint. Always build screen-by-screen. The friend feeling proud of their one-shot app on day one is the friend rebuilding it from scratch on day three.
• Skipping the brief "Just figure it out" prompts force the AI to guess. The bigger the guess, the worse the foundation. Ten minutes building a real brief saves five hours undoing what the AI guessed wrong about your user flow, your database, your design direction. The brief isn't optional — it's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
• No version control When v3 breaks something v2 had working, you need to roll back. Without pin / snapshot / commit habits, your only option is to keep prompting the AI to "fix it" — which usually breaks something else. Pin / snapshot / commit after every page works. Future-you will be sending past-you flowers.
• Over-explaining in every prompt Once your CLAUDE.md or system prompt has your context — your stack, your brand, your voice — stop pasting it again every chat. It's already there. Re-pasting it just burns tokens and dilutes the prompt with noise. (If you want the deep dive on why this matters, my token-saving guide goes hard on it.)
• Trying to fix a bad foundation with more prompts The killer. If pages 1 and 2 are messy, page 5 will be a disaster — no amount of "make it cleaner" prompting will fix it. When you feel the foundation is wrong, start over. Sunk-cost fallacy is the #1 thing that kills vibe-coded apps. The 30 minutes to rebuild on a clean foundation is always cheaper than the 6 hours of patching a broken one.

This is the prompt that turns "I have an idea" into a real plan in 10 minutes. Paste it into Claude.ai or ChatGPT (not the builder), replace the bracketed bits, and let the AI walk you through the brief.

Help me plan a [type of app] for [audience].

Before any code:
1. List every page/screen the app needs.
2. Map the user flow — what does someone do first, second, third.
3. List the database tables I need (with columns + relationships).
4. Suggest a tech stack (framework, database, hosting) appropriate for someone non-technical.
5. Sketch the visual direction in 3 lines (vibe, fonts, colours).

Don't write any code yet. Show me your plan. I'll iterate with you before we move to the builder.

When the AI gives you the plan, poke at it. "Why three tables and not two?" "Is there a simpler way to do the user flow?" "Can we skip page 4 for v1?" The brief gets sharper with every question.

Once you can read it out loud and it makes sense — that's when you open Lovable, Bolt, or Claude Code. Paste the brief in as the first message. Then ask for page one.

All three tools work with this framework. Here's how I'd pick between them based on what you're trying to do:

If you want to be in a room with other women figuring this out — asking questions, sharing wins, getting unstuck together — come into the Wright Mode Membership. We share workflows, prompts, and skills like the ones in this playbook every week.