Mastering Vibe Coding: A Comprehensive Guide to Fundamentals and Frameworks

Here's the cliffnotes version to save you the hundreds, actually probably at this point thousands, of hours spent watching tutorials, taking courses, but honestly mostly just trial and error developing applications through vibe coding. Vibe coding is seriously a game-changer and has fundamentally changed the way that many code and develop apps. Which is why in this article, we'll be focusing on the fundamentals, the frameworks, and the principles of good vibe coding. Then, we'll also explore how to apply these principles of vibe coding with any tool.

As per usual, it is not enough just to read about stuff. To get the most out of this, try to apply these concepts to your own projects. Now without further ado, let's get going.

An Outline of This Article

First, we'll define vibe coding. Then, we're going to be talking about the principles of good vibe coding. We'll then show you some examples of vibe coding in action using various tools. Finally, we'll end with some very practical tips to help you along your vibe coding journey and to make sure that you don't end up making common mistakes. Please pay attention until the end.

What is Vibe Coding?

I'm sure many of you have heard the term vibe coding a lot of times by now. This is a term that was coined by Andrej Karpathy, who among many of his achievements, is one of the founding members of OpenAI. On February 3rd, 2025, he made a post on X that says: "There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding where you fully give into the vibes. Embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists."

It's possible because the LLMs, for example, Cursor Composer with Sonnet, are getting so good. You basically just tell the LLM what it is that you want to build, and it would just go ahead and build it for you. Some people literally just speak to it. For example, you can just prompt it with something like:

Create a simple React web app called Daily Vibes. Users can select a mood from a list of emojis, optionally write a short note, and submit it. Below, show a list of past mood entries with the date and a note.

And yeah, that's it. Give it to the LLM and it generates the code for you. And voila, that's what you get. Seems very, very simple. Crazy, right? You can see how it fundamentally changes the way that you code and build things. But with that being said though, it's not like black magic, and vibe coding will magically just work for everything. There are still principles and order in this chaos in how it is you ask it to build these things. So without further ado, let's actually cover these principles.

The Core Principles of Good Vibe Coding

The best course that I found that covers the principles, the fundamentals of vibe coding, is a course called Vibe Coding 101 with Replet. It's a nice little free course that's created by Replet, which is a platform for vibe coding apps, in collaboration with deep learning AI. The course explains that there are five fundamental skills in vibe coding, which are: thinking, frameworks, checkpoints, debugging, and context.

1. Thinking Thoroughly

You need to thoroughly think through exactly what it is that you want to build and then communicate that with the AI. What we mean by "think thoroughly" is actually four different levels of thinking. Say, for example, you want to program a computer to play competitive chess.

• Logical Thinking: This is just what is the game, and in this case, the game is chess. The first two levels of thinking are probably really obvious and just very intuitive to you.
• Analytical Thinking: This is asking the question, "How do I play this game? What is the main objective, the goal of the game?"
• Computational Thinking: You need to figure out how to fit the logic of this game into a complicated set of problems and configurations on the chessboard. You also need to think about how do you enforce these rules.
• Procedural Thinking: This is when you ask the question, "How do I excel in this game?" Not only do you want to play this game, you want to play it well. So you need to think about what are some strategies that you can use, what are the boundaries that you can push so that you're able to program your computer to be able to do well at the game.

Then, of course, you need to translate this natural language that we described and communicate that to the AI to build. Now, for whatever it is that you're trying to build—a game, a web app, whatever—you also need to go through these four levels of thinking to truly properly define what it is that you want to build.

Honestly, this is where most vibe coders have the most opportunity for improvement. Because oftentimes, because you're using natural language just to describe what you want to do, you don't really actually think through what it is that you want to build, what it is that you want your final product to look like. And that's actually kind of unfair because if you don't even think through exactly what it is that you want, how do you expect the AI to be able to figure out what it is that you want built?

Actually, the best way to make sure that you go through each of these levels of thinking and communicate it clearly to the AI is to create something called a PRD (Product Requirements Document).

Here is an example PRD for an AI-powered personalized nutrition plan for diabetes:

• Project Overview (Logical Thinking): The goal of this project is to develop an AI-powered system that creates personalized nutrition plans for individuals with diabetes. The system will take into account various health-related factors such as medical analyses, weight, dietary habits, calorie consumption, and more.
• Skills (Analytical Thinking):
  • Python
  • Healthcare Data Processing
  • OpenAI's API
  • Image Processing for visual plans
  • UI Development
• Key Features (Computational Thinking):
  • Milestone 1: A generalized personalized nutrition plan engine that includes specific metrics like individual health metrics and socioeconomic factors.
  • Milestone 2: Give more contextual customization, specifically considering people's literacy and education levels and making the application adaptable and more accessible to different types of people.
• Details (Procedural Thinking): This is exemplified throughout the PRD just by adding as much detail as possible. For example, defining exactly which factors like individual health metrics (medical analyses and dietary intake data) and socioeconomic factors (income, location, and local food availability) as well as what types of contextual customization.

The more detail you can go into thinking about your target audience, who you want to be using your application, and that experience that they should get, and all the factors that go into it to make it the best experience possible, the clearer your vision is, and the clearer the PRD is, and the better results you will get from the AI.

Also, just by the way, you don't need to come up with this PRD all by yourself. Here is a prompt that will work with you and ask you the right questions for you to be able to come up with a well-defined PRD to build your app.

Help me to make a PRD for an MVP app I'm looking to vibe code.
The app is an interactive app that displays the SEO metatags for any website in an interactive visual way to check that they're properly implemented.
The app should fetch the HTML for a site, then provide feedback and SEO tags in accordance with best practices for SEO optimization.
The app should give Google and social media previews.

Think through these questions:
1. What is this app?
2. How do I use the app?
3. What are the patterns behind the app?
4. How do I make the app the most useful for the target audience?

Here is an example PRD to guide you: [Link to example PRD]

I highly recommend that you spend a significant amount of time at this section. It is always so much easier to have a clearer vision of what you want as opposed to building something, figuring out that it's not exactly what you want, and then trying to fix it halfway.

2. Know Your Frameworks

Whatever it is that you want to build, chances are somebody has already built something like it or something very, very similar to what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And since AI is trained on all the pre-existing solutions that are already available, if you're able to direct the AI towards the correct framework for building what you want to build, you're going to have much better results than asking it to just try its best to come up with something from scratch.

And the easiest way to do this in vibe coding is just to list out the frameworks or the packages that you want the AI to use to implement the solution that you want. You're kind of just like pointing it in the right direction. For example, for your web app, you can specify that you wanted to use a React backend and a CSS and HTML/JavaScript front end, and specifically maybe Tailwind CSS for the styling for this specific type of application. Or say that you want to be creating animations, you can specifically say, "Please use three.js," which is a very popular package for creating animations.

Okay, so the question you might be thinking right now is, "But what if I don't know what is the best way of implementing this thing?" No problem. You can actually ask AI to help you figure it out first. For example, if you want to implement a drag-and-drop UI, which is a very common thing to implement, you could say:

Could you help me come up with some React frameworks to implement drag and drop into this application and then implement it?

What is actually the key thing here is to be open to learning about these different frameworks and how all of these components fit together. With vibe coding, it's not necessary for you to exactly know how to implement each of these things yourself, but it's still really important to have an understanding of the structure of what it is that you're trying to build. Like if you're making a web application, at the very minimum, you should be aware of what a front end is, what a backend is, how the front end and backend communicate with each other, and what are certain frameworks that are very popular or commonly used for the front end and the back end. Think about it as building and developing and learning with the AI at the same time. This will make you a much better vibe coder in the long run.

3. Always Have Checkpoints and Version Control

Things will break. That is a fact. You do not want to end up losing all of your work because you did not know about version control. It is a cautionary tale. Please always have version control. There are some software like Replet, for example, that has pretty decent version control that's already built in. But for the majority of software, and it's just like generally best practice, is to learn how to use Git and GitHub, which I'm actually going to give you a crash course on right now.

If you already know how to use Git and GitHub, consider this a quick little refresh.

• Git vs. GitHub: First of all, Git is the version control software itself, while GitHub is a website that allows you to store your code, your repositories, on the cloud so that you're able to have it saved somewhere else and also so that you can share it with other people.
• Installation: First, you need to install Git, and you can do this by either downloading it from the website or you can go through your terminal/command line, or honestly, you can just ask your AI code editor software to do it for you.
• Initializing a Repository: Assuming that you want to start a new project from scratch and you're in that current folder, the command that you want to use is git init, which is initializing Git.
• Tracking Files: Now, let's say you start adding some things. You might want to add a README, or you just start vibe coding and now you have a bunch of files that are there. If you use the command git status, it will show that you have a lot of files that are untracked. In order to track these files, you use the command git add. You can do git add readme.md or whatever files that you want to start tracking. Or you can just do git add . The dot means just track everything.
• Committing Changes: But you're not done with just adding these files and tracking these files. When you actually want to save a certain version of it, you use the command git commit. This is where you would explicitly commit the changes that you made to the files. And you can also type a message that explains what you changed in the codebase, or otherwise known as the repository. For example, your first commit could be git commit -m "initial commit".
• Viewing History: And that's it. Actually, if you just do this, you would be tracking your changes, saving your changes by committing it. And you just keep on doing that. And if you ever want to look at the changes that you made, you can use a command called git log. And if you want to roll back a commit, then it's git reset.
• Pushing to GitHub: Okay, so after you made a bunch of changes, did all your things, and maybe you want to share your code now on GitHub, you can go to github.com, create a new repository, and initiate it. Copy the remote URL, then use the command git remote add origin <URL>. This will link your local repo that's being saved on your computer to GitHub. Then you might want to rename your branch, which is the current repository version that you're working with, and call it main. So you can do git branch -M main. Then finally, you can push everything from your local repository onto GitHub with the command git push -u origin main.

There are obviously like a lot of other little nuances and commands and specifics that you can go into a lot more detail about, but just knowing what I explained to you, that entire workflow, that should be enough for you to have a good understanding of what version control is supposed to look like and what the flow is supposed to look like. And even though I did cover the exact commands that you should be inputting, using an AI code editor, you actually don't need to know these exact commands. Like as long as you know what that structure is, you can just directly ask the AI using natural language. You can just say, "Use Git to commit these changes, push it to GitHub on this branch, roll back the previous version, merge everything together." I hope that makes sense.

Overall, I hope you can also see that the key to vibe coding is to understand these high-level structures, these high-level components, and the flows of things so that you're able to direct the AI in the implementation. Implementation is where AI excels at.

4. The Art of Debugging

Whatever it is that you're building is going to go wrong. It's just a matter of when it's going to go wrong and how it's going to go wrong. Which is why debugging and fixing the thing is just as important as the actual building itself. This is a skill that is drilled into engineers with many, many years of training. But for many vibe coders, though, especially those who don't have an engineering or coding background, debugging might be something that they don't actually have a lot of experience in. And it's very important to learn this skill.

The best type of debugging is very methodical and thorough. First, you need to identify where the problem is and what the problem is. Then you need to apply different solutions to try to fix the problem. Sounds super simple, right? But do not underestimate the art of debugging.

In the case of vibe coding, when you realize that something doesn't work, I actually find that the best way is to just point it out to the AI and then let the AI come up with the solutions to fix it itself. For example, I recently was building an application and it kept on coming up with an error. I basically just copy-pasted the error message and went like, "There is an error," and the AI responded with like, "Oh, let me try to fix it," and then it comes up with different solutions to try to fix the problem. And really, all you have to do oftentimes is just to accept the changes. And if it still doesn't work, it might just go through a lot of cycles of this. Just got to be patient and just, you know, keep pointing it out, letting it do its thing, and oftentimes it resolves itself.

But in the off chance that it doesn't resolve itself easily, it is really, really helpful to have a basic understanding of what you're building. Like, for example, I kept on getting the same error over and over again. But since I understand file structures and how the files are working with each other, I was able to point out which file was probably causing the problem and which section was probably causing the problem, and the AI was able to go and fix it.

Another example was when I got this overlapping UI component which I didn't like. I was like, "This thing is overlapping." I sent it to the AI, and then it made some weird changes and the whole thing just disappeared. And then I was very patient and was more specific about exactly what it is that I wanted. And looking at the code, I could tell that it was just statically trying to input a certain dimension so that depending on the orientation of the website, sometimes it would overlap and sometimes it wouldn't. And then I just pointed out that it needed to be dynamic so that it's not overlapping at any point. And then fortunately, it was then able to fix it.

5. Provide Rich Context

The general rule of thumb is that the more context—as in, the more information and detail—that you can provide to your AI, to your LLM, the better the results are going to be. And context can come in a lot of different forms. It could be that the original prompt or the PRD that you're inputting has a lot of details in it. You can even provide it with mockups of what exactly you want it to look like. Or you can be providing it with examples or extra data that can help it build the application. Details about your app, your environment, your preferences, as well as errors. Instead of just saying, "This thing doesn't work," you can actually copy-paste the full error message and a screenshot of what exactly doesn't work and provide that to the AI.

Vibe Coding in Action: Practical Examples

Now I'm going to show you some examples of vibe coding, starting with Replet.

Example 1: Building an SEO Analyzer with Replet

Replet is a platform where you can use AI to vibe code different applications and deploy them really, really quickly, all on the cloud. It is super beginner-friendly. All you have to do is log on to Replet, and they have some free credits that you can get started with. Let's start off with the PRD for a very simple app that displays SEO metatags for any website that is inputted.

To get started, the first thing I'm going to do is actually use an LLM to help me really think about what I want this application to look like and generate a PRD for it. I'm going to use a variation of the prompt that I showed you earlier. It helps us generate this:

SEO Tag Visual Inspector MVP PRD

• Project Overview: ...
• Key Features:
  • Input URL field
  • HTML fetching and parsing
  • SEO tag extraction
  • Visual feedback previews
  • Total score out of 100

This looks pretty good to me. So I'm going to ask it to make this into a prompt to build an app using Replet. On top of this, I'm going to say, "Generate an image mockup or inspo."

Here is a Replet. And what I'm going to do is just copy-paste the prompt from the LLM and also link the inspo and click "Start Building." It's going to be called "SEO Tag Scout." As it's generating, you can see that it's literally designing the visuals and it's also populating the files over here as well.

For Replet, it already does have pretty good version control. You can roll back pretty easily here. Although for best practices, you still really do want to be using Git at some point.

While it's finishing up building everything over here, what I really recommend that you do is you can go over here and actually add an assistant and use the assistant and ask, "Could you explain to me the file structure in this project?" You don't have to do this, but it's one of those things where if you're learning about the frameworks that are being used while you're vibe coding, this is going to significantly improve your skills as a vibe coder because you're going to be able to understand what's actually happening and how the files are going to be interacting with each other.

It looks like our app is now finished. Let's actually test this out. Let's try www.lonelyoctopus.com. Check. Uh oh, that didn't work. So what I'm going to do is say, "There is an error." Like a true vibe coder, we're going to hope that it fixes itself. Okay, let's try testing it out again. lonelyoctopus.com. And cool, it seems to be showing something. The title is shorter than recommended, meta description, blah, blah, blah, all of these things. And we can see that here's the Google preview, here's the social media preview, Twitter card previews, and raw data tags.

Okay, so I just want to make sure that the number actually changes depending on the website. Let's try something else, like the website called theuselesswebsite.com. Okay, so it's also still showing 86. What about this other website? Okay, all right. So the number is changing depending on what it is. It's like, this is not visually appealing. Make it colorful. Yeah, make it colorful. I also don't like how the raw data tags are here, but it's not specifically specifying what the title is. Like, I want that to be showcased. And I'm going to do that in the next round of edits here.

Another key thing to remember is that it's best to, when you're pointing something out, like something that you want to be changed, doing it one at a time as opposed to a laundry list of things that you want to change, because that could potentially confuse the AI. Oh, cool. I guess it did that already without me saying anything. Oh, and it's like showing little icons. So that's nice. Okay, let's try this again. lonelyoctopus.com. Okay, I like that. This is much, much better.

Example 2: Migrating to a Local AI Code Editor

Once you're done, you can take this and deploy it when you want to. But if you do want to create something that is more complex and that's also more scalable, you will at some point want to migrate to an AI code editor, something like Windsurf or Cursor. So I'm actually just going to show you what that is like using Windsurf, for example.

First of all, regardless of which of these tools that you're using, the principles that we just talked about for vibe coding, like the skill set itself, is pretty much the same. So don't worry about that. It's more the fact that after you get through the beginner stages, most people will want to switch over to an AI coding editor like Cursor and Windsurf because it's more robust, has more functionalities, and also allows for greater scalability.

Of course, with these types of things, there's always a trade-off. Like with Replet, it is a lot faster, really easy to use, everything is based on the cloud. So you don't really have to deal with setting up your environment and the deployment process. While for Cursor and Windsurf, there are a lot more functionalities that are available. These code editors are built for full-scale development. So you're pretty much able to do any type of development and be able to tweak things and fine-tune things to the exact way that you want it to look. Of course, the downside is that there is a higher learning curve. You need to learn how to set up your environments properly, how to debug issues with your environment. A lot of issues come because of not setting up your environment correctly. You also need to learn how to deploy things, how to monitor things over time.

So this is the Windsurf environment. I'm actually going to put in the exact same prompt and then also the image as well. This is going to be a local development environment, so it's going to start off by setting up a bunch of things locally. You can see that the files are populating themselves over here as well. It's running a terminal command, and we can accept this. You can disable the asking and you can just let it auto-run, but I have trust issues because it's on my local environment instead of like Replet where it's in its own isolated thing on the web. So I do like to want to make sure that I am accepting things and not doing random things to my local environment.

Okay, cool. It looks like it has something done. It says, "Feel free to try it on the browser preview I've opened for you." Cool. We see that it has some of these very similar elements here. www.lonelyoctopus.com, for example. Check. Oops, need to add an https. Okay, this actually looks way better than Replet's first version, I got to say. It actually looks really, really similar to the inspo that we provided.

So SEO tag analysis, yeah, this looks pretty good to me. Let's try something else. maze.toys/mazes/min/daily. It's just like a random website. Okay, SEO tag is 25. So the numbers are actually different between Replet and Windsurf. So that's interesting. Something I probably want to dig into, asking like how it's calculating these SEO tags. But overall, it looks like it's working pretty well. And I quite like this.

So I'm going to ask it to change, though. To improve on this a little bit, I'm going to say, "Make it so that you don't need to type https before the URL." It still doesn't work. So I'm just going to write, "Still doesn't work." Let's try again. lonelyoctopus.com. Okay, cool. So that works now. Obviously, there's like other things that we want to fiddle around with a little bit, like things that are not centered. Might want to change these colors a little bit. But I hope this gives you a good idea for how it is that you can start building using Windsurf as the experience.

And so in this case, you also definitely do want to start using Git and GitHub as well. So what you can do is be like, "Initiate Git for version control," and just type that in. Accepting everything here, and then Git is going to be initialized. Everything here turned green, which means that it's untracked. It asked, "Do you want to git add everything?" We can accept. And it's asking us if we want to commit as well as our initial commit. So we can accept. So great, now everything is being tracked as version control. And when you're ready, you can also git push and you can actually see everything now on GitHub.

But regardless of what you use, remember the principles that we went through for vibe coding. Do keep those in mind and apply them regardless of what kind of tools that you're using.

Advanced Tips for Your Vibe Coding Journey

Now let's go on to our final section where I'm going to give you some more tips and tricks and frameworks and mindsets that will help you along your vibe coding journey.

Start Small with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

The first one is very much a mindset. If you're already an engineer, you probably already think this way. But if you're someone who maybe doesn't come from more of a technical background, always think about starting small and working your way up. In other words, whatever it is that you're creating, always think about it as the minimal viable product, which is what are the minimum amount of features that you can put into your application for it to function. After you get the thing to actually work, then you can iterate and put on additional features and functionalities on top of that. This is the correct vibe coding mindset as opposed to you coming up with the most lavish thing with all the details that you can possibly think of and a million different features. No, no, no, no. I can already think of all the errors and issues that you're going to get from that and then just you ripping out your hair because you can't figure out what's going wrong. Always start with the minimal viable product and then iterate on top of it. Get the thing to work first.

Understand Your Development Mode: Implementing vs. Debugging

Next up is a framework that's also from the Vibe Coding 101 course, which I think is really, really helpful. It shows that when you're developing or building an app, when you're vibe coding, there's really only two modes that you're in: you're either implementing a new feature or you're debugging errors.

• When you're implementing a new feature, what you want to remember is to provide context relevant to the new features. Mention frameworks, provide documentations with explicit details, etc., and then making incremental changes and doing the checkpoints and version control, etc.
• When you're in debugging errors mode, what you want to keep in mind is firstly figuring out how things work. Do you have a good understanding of the structure of your project itself? If you don't, you know, ask AI and actually figure that out because it's going to be very helpful to figure out what is actually going wrong in your application. And when you figure out what's wrong, think about how to get that information to the LLM to get unstuck. And this is where the final principle, context, is helpful. Just try to provide as much context and information as possible to guide your LLM to fix the problem. Give it screenshots of what's wrong, give it the error message, point it towards the right file to be looking into.

I really love this framework. So take a screenshot or something, and whenever you're getting frustrated or not know what you're supposed to do, just try to remember which mode that you're in and what you should be doing in which mode.

Establish Writing Rules and Documentation

Final tip that is a little bit more advanced, and these are writing rules or documentation. This is kind of like a system prompt that you're giving to your coding agent. And this is where you can list out certain things that you wanted to do or to not do. For example, some of the best practices that you probably want to put in your rules include:

• Limit code changes to the minimum when implementing a new feature or fixing something. This is because AI sometimes has this tendency of changing a lot of different files unnecessarily to fix a very small thing, and then it could potentially break other issues.
• Rate limit all API endpoints. This is just to make sure that you're not calling an API and incurring multiple times and incurring a lot of cost.
• Enable CAPTCHA on all auth and signup pages for security reasons.

And yeah, there are a lot of other rules that you can put into this file. You can also find online people have written these rules that are specific to certain types of apps or certain languages that you're using as well that you can put into your rule file as well. And you can take this rule file and give it to Replet or Cursor or Windsurf too.

Especially if you're someone who doesn't come from an engineering background or a development background, I really recommend that you actually look into the rules that are specific for ensuring safety and security in your apps. Like putting it in your... at least learn things about API keys and why it is that you shouldn't be exposing your API keys. And while you're learning these, also put your rules into your rules file so you're reminding your AI to be abiding by best security practices as well so you don't get hacked.

All right, there is honestly a lot more that I can go into detail about. Like, for example, having styling documents that you can reference, how you should be refactoring your code, using something like MCP servers if you're building something like AI agents and you want to give your AI agents more tools and functionalities. There's just a lot which I don't have time to cover in this article right now.

But for now, we have come to the end of this article. I really hope this vibe coding fundamentals article is helpful for you to get started doing it correctly, like vibe coding with best practices in mind.

Thank you so much for reading this article, and happy vibe coding!