The Art of Vibe Design
You can like just build stuff.
I built this entire site without writing a single line of code myself. No designs in Figma. No components coded from scratch. Just conversations with Claude about what I wanted it to feel like. It took me less than an hour.
That sentence would have been impossible three years ago.
(Go to the landing page to see more of what I mean).
The old way
Before AI, building something with personality required three separate people. You needed a designer to make it look right. A developer to make it work. And someone with taste to tell both of them what "right" actually meant.
Most people only had one of those skills. So they either built ugly-but-functional things, or beautiful-but-broken things, or they just didn't build at all.
The distance between "I want this" and "this exists" was measured in weeks, budgets, and expertise you didn't have.
The bridge
AI didn't make designers or developers obsolete. It made not being a designer or developer less of a barrier. The constraint isn't skill anymore, but rather taste.
I can describe a receipt printer contact form and Claude builds it. I can say "make the buttons feel like physical hardware" and it generates the shadow depth and spring physics. I can ask for a Swiss-style grid system and it appears.
But Claude didn't decide that a receipt printer was funny. Claude didn't choose Teenage Engineering as the aesthetic reference. Claude didn't decide that friction could be a feature. That's taste. That's the human part.
The AI writes the code. You provide the vision.
The New Skillset
When I built this site, here's what I brought to the conversation:
References. I knew I wanted Bauhaus principles. I knew I wanted Teenage Engineering's aesthetic. I knew I wanted hardware constraints applied to software. Claude can execute on "make this feel like a Dieter Rams product," but you have to know who Dieter Rams is.
Judgment. Claude generates ten versions of a component. You pick the one that works. That's a decision of taste where you act as art director while AI serves as the production team.
Iteration. Nothing works on the first try. You refine. You push back. You say "make it heavier" or "this feels too corporate" and the AI adjusts. The conversation is the design process.
The components on this site aren't templates. They're custom-built for the specific narrative of each post. That direction came from me. The implementation came from AI.
The New Ceiling
We used to be bottlenecked by implementation. "I can't build that, I don't know React." "I can't design that, I don't know Figma." Now we're bottlenecked by taste.
Can you recognize good work when you see it? Can you articulate what "feels right"? Can you reference influences and combine them in interesting ways? That's the skill now.
The people who succeed in this new era aren't the ones who can code the fastest or design the cleanest. They're the ones who know what they want and can communicate it clearly.
AI is a force multiplier for taste. If you have good taste, you can now execute at a level that used to require a team. If you have bad taste, you can now build bad things very quickly.
Permissionless
You don't need a designer's approval anymore. You don't need a developer to take your ticket. You don't need a degree or a bootcamp or a portfolio. You need an idea and the ability to articulate it.
This site exists because I wanted it to exist. Not because I convinced someone to fund it, or hired someone to build it, or spent six months learning to code. I described it and it appeared.
That's new. That's fundamentally different from how things worked before.
The Opportunity
If you've been sitting on an idea because you "can't code" or "can't design," that excuse expired. The barrier is gone. What's left is: do you actually want to build it?
Do you have a vision? Can you describe what "good" looks like in your domain? Can you iterate toward it? Then you can build it. The tools are here. The permission structure is gone.
The question isn't "how do I learn to code this?" anymore but rather "what do I actually want to exist?"
Build with taste
The future belongs to people who have strong opinions about details that don't matter to anyone else. The people who care that a shadow is exactly 4px with 60% opacity. The people who spend an hour on an animation that lasts 300ms.
That's not wasted time anymore. That's the competitive advantage. That's what AI can't generate on its own.
So stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting to "learn enough." Start describing what you want. The bridge is built. Walk across it.
