Last week I attended an informal networking via Zoom that soon veered into Vibe Coding. Confession time – I was unfamiliar with the term and had to consult my friendly neighborhood search engine. It turns out that I was already a Vibe Coding rock star without knowing that’s what I was doing.

Vibe Coding is a fairly new (first documented a year or so ago) technique, in which developers use natural-language prompts to have AI agents (think Claude or ChatGPT) to write, debug, and iterate on code. According to its early adopters, it emphasizes rapid prototyping and “feeling” the code’s direction over manual syntax writing. So you are leveraging AI to help improve the code generated by humans.

My use case involved developing landing pages. Salesforce Account Engagement (formerly known as “Pardot”) is our marketing automation platform of choice. Although it produces nice emails and has some wonderful list-making features, the landing pages it produces are plain vanilla at best. Frustrated, I booked a session with Salesforce’s success team to discuss options for landing pages. Their answers ranged from denials to stifled yawns. Yes, they know their tool produces terrible landing pages, but enhancing the landing page capability is nowhere near the product roadmap.

So I went on an expedition to find landing pages that I liked and grab the source code. With more than 30 years of HTML programming (YIKES!) under my belt, I thought modifying the source code would be a breeze. Some of the pages were fairly easy to modify, but the challenge was getting the code to play nice in Salesforce and also the company’s website platform. The website is done in Squarespace. Why a company that provides consulting and claims processing services to health plans would have a website platform designed for consumer e-commerce is a mystery. Save that rant for another day. I was struggling a bit with the source code, so I thought I’d ask ChatGPT for help. So I fed the source code into ChatGPT and asked how it could be modified to suit. There was a lot of back and forth with ChatGPT, but ultimately – after a few hours of restating, reframing, and revising – it advised me on what code changes needed to be made.

The back and forth with AI is important to note. AI is only as good as the human that is using it. If you don’t know how to question AI’s output and course-correct, you are in for a huge problem. We’ve all seen AI slop. Vibe Coding is just the latest wrinkle in the story of how AI can make us smarter and better at our jobs. But you can’t just let it go off on its own. Humans have to be in the loop.