Vibe coding for marketers: what it actually means (and what it doesn't)

You’ve probably seen “vibe coding” everywhere lately. It was Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year. Tech Twitter won’t stop talking about it. Everyone from startup founders to venture capitalists has an opinion on what it means for the future of software.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: every explanation of vibe coding is aimed at developers.

The irony is that the word “coding” in “vibe coding” is scaring away the exact people who’d benefit from it the most.

For marketers, vibe coding unlocks something entirely different. It gives you a capability you’ve never had before: the ability to build exactly the tool, workflow, or asset you need, without writing a single line of code yourself.

So what is vibe coding, actually?

The term comes from Andrej Karpathy, one of the most respected AI researchers in the world (he co-founded OpenAI and led AI at Tesla). He described it as a style of working where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

That sounds very developer-y. Let me translate.

Vibe coding means describing what you want in plain English and letting AI build it for you. You’re not writing code. You’re describing an outcome, reviewing what you get back, and iterating until it’s right.

If you’ve ever written a creative brief or project managed a developer, you already know the core skill. You describe what you want, you review the first draft, you give feedback, and you iterate. That’s vibe coding.

Why this matters more for you than for developers

Think about the last time you had an idea for a tool that would make your work easier. Maybe it was a spreadsheet that auto-formatted reports or a simple app that helped you organize content in a specific way.

What happened to that idea? If you’re like most marketers, it went into a mental folder labeled “would be nice, but I’d need a developer for that.” Or maybe you submitted a request to your engineering team and it sat in a backlog for months.

That gap between “I have an idea for something that would help” and “I actually have the thing in my hands” used to require a developer, a budget, and weeks of lead time. Now it requires a description of what you want and a willingness to iterate on the output.

That’s why vibe coding for marketers can be so powerful. Not “AI does your marketing for you.” Rather, you can now build custom software to solve your specific problems, problems that were never important enough for an engineering team to prioritize but that eat up hours of your week.

What I’ve actually built

I want to be honest about what vibe coding looks like in practice. It’s not “I built an entire SaaS in a weekend” (despite what Twitter will tell you). Here’s what it actually looks like for me:

A custom image generation tool. I needed a very specific type of image for a project. I could’ve learned Photoshop or wrestled with an AI image generator, but the images I needed were specific enough that a programmatic tool could generate them faster and more accurately than I could by hand. So I described what I wanted to Claude Code and built the tool.

An image tagging interface. I had a bunch of images that needed to be tagged and labeled in a specific way. I could’ve done it manually (tedious) or tried to get an LLM to tag them all automatically (unreliable). Instead, I built a simple interface that made the tagging process faster and more consistent. Just a basic tool with a visual layout designed around my specific workflow.

Competitor analysis reports. I described the analysis I wanted, pointed Claude Code at some competitors, and had a polished report in minutes. I wrote about this process in detail in how I use Claude Code to research competitors.

Content repurposing at scale. Took a single piece of content and turned it into platform-specific social posts. The whole workflow is in how to turn one piece of content into 10 social posts.

Code-generated infographics. Instead of fighting with design tools or hoping an AI image generator would spell things correctly, I had Claude Code build infographics as HTML, iterated in the browser, and exported pixel-perfect PDFs. The full breakdown is in why I stopped using AI image generators for infographics.

The pattern across all of these: there was software that could solve my problem, but I felt blocked on building it. Vibe coding removed that block.

And if I had to get developer time or learn how to build it myself, I would have never done it. So many of these things are single-use tools that make a particular task easier and are now possible to create with vibe coding.

What vibe coding is NOT

This is the part where I’m going to be the honest voice in the room, because there’s a lot of hype out there and some of it is misleading.

Vibe coding is not “AI does everything and you go to the beach.” Claude Code doesn’t know your audience. It doesn’t know what performed well last quarter or why your boss hates that particular shade of blue. You still have to bring the thinking, the judgment, and the taste. The tool brings the execution speed.

You probably can’t build a production SaaS in a weekend. But you can absolutely build tools that make your specific workday measurably better. The sweet spot is custom software that solves your particular problems: the tools that were never important enough for an engineering team to build but that save you real time every week.

The marketer’s role becomes creative director. You set the vision, review the output, and iterate until it’s right. That’s a skill in itself, and it’s one marketers are already good at. You’ve been reviewing creative work and giving feedback your entire career. This is the same muscle.

This is also where things like skills come in. You can teach Claude Code your specific workflows, your brand voice, your processes, so the tool gets better at executing the way you’d want it to. This way, you’re building up a system that reflects your expertise. The marketer’s judgment is what makes the whole thing work.

”But I’m not technical”

Good. That’s the point.

Vibe coding is literally defined by not being technical. The entire premise is that natural language is the interface. You describe what you want, the same way you’d describe it to a colleague, and the tool figures out how to build it.

You don’t need to understand the code that gets generated. You need to understand what you want, and you need to be able to tell whether what you got back matches what you had in mind. That’s it.

The terminal looks intimidating (I know, I hear this constantly), but it’s really just a text box where you type what you want in plain English. I wrote a whole post about why you don’t need to be afraid of it: Don’t be scared of the terminal.

Here’s the thing that frustrates me a little: the word “coding” in “vibe coding” is the single biggest barrier to the people who’d benefit most from this approach. If it were called “vibe directing” or “vibe briefing,” I think twice as many marketers would’ve already tried it.

Don’t let a label keep you from a capability.

Getting started

If this sounds like something you want to try, I built a free 7-day email course that walks you through everything, from opening the terminal to building real marketing workflows with Claude Code. No coding experience required. Sign up below, or if you want to jump right in, Don’t be scared of the terminal is where I’d start.

Happy vibing!