5 things I learned after vibe coding my first app

Vibe coding is easier than ever thanks to the diversity of tools available for developers and novices alike. While it would take hours or even days for a beginner to get a simple app up and running without AI, vibe coding allows you to do this in minutes.

I dived into the world of vibe coding by completing a Google AI course, which covered the essentials of using Google AI Studio. And after I got my first app up and running, I realized that the experience was different from what I’d envisioned.

1. It’s simpler than you expect

I expected some sort of learning curve with vibe coding, but the simplicity of tools like Google’s AI Studio caught me by surprise. I had some help in terms of the course, which included lessons that gave me example prompts and showed off different tools. But these weren’t in-depth or complex lessons. Most weren’t even more than five minutes and just provided a demo to follow. When I then had to create my own app from scratch, it took me less than 30 minutes to get it up and running.

The app I created is relatively simple — a spreadsheet analyzer. It lets me upload spreadsheets of my article performance, visualizes the data, and uses AI to identify trends and potential new ideas. It even adapts to the different spreadsheet data available. For example, it provides views and filters for the important metrics for different sites. For one site, that may be pageviews. For another site, that may be time spent on the article.

I had the app up and running within a few prompts. I knew that vibe coding made apps much easier to create, but I didn’t realize just how effective it was.

2. Tools lean more towards web apps

When you read about vibe coding online, most tools people refer to are used to create web apps. Even in my course on vibe coding, only web apps were covered. You can create mobile apps with vibe coding, but the process is usually more involved and often requires the use of additional tools. For example, you can use Android Studio with Gemini to create Android apps.

However, this is changing. Google recently introduced the ability to create Android apps in AI Studio, which will make the process significantly easier for newcomers who aren’t familiar with tools like Android Studio.

Personally, I would like to create a productivity app for myself that caters to my very specific needs because I often find that productivity apps fail me when I need them most. The downside is that we may see a lot more low-quality apps flood the Google Play Store, an issue that I think Play Protect is already failing to cope with.

3. You don’t need coding experience, but it comes at a cost

Beyond some rudimentary HTML and a very simple understanding of certain coding concepts, I have no coding experience. But even I was able to easily create a functional web app in a few minutes with Gemini. This means you don’t have to be a developer or even understand a coding language to vibe code.

However, this lack of experience comes with a major drawback — you can’t verify the integrity of the product you create with AI. Vibe-coded apps are notorious for including vulnerabilities and if you’re not a developer, you basically have no real way to identify issues with your code. This means that you don’t know if it’s creating an insecure integration with other services or if it’s exposing personal information.

For me, this means I’m very careful with what I create apps for. I also never make them publicly available. Understanding how easy it is to make apps has also made me more skeptical of vibe-coded products. Even apps developed by professionals have bugs and potential vulnerabilities, so I’m not about to start using apps where these issues could be easily missed by beginners.

4. Troubleshooting isn’t the time-sink I expected it to be

When it comes to trends like self-hosting or setting up certain hardware, I often find that the theory makes things seem a lot easier than reality. For example, one of the realities of self-hosting is how much time you spend troubleshooting, even if you’re using example files from the developer.

This wasn’t my experience with vibe coding. I expected there to be a lot of issues with changing certain elements on my app, but there weren’t many hiccups. When it comes to bugs and errors, you can often just get the AI agent to troubleshoot for you. In AI Studio, you can do this with a click of a button or a prompt. For example, in one of my lessons, the demo had an intentional bug to show how easily you can get Gemini to fix it.

For more complex apps, this process will likely become more difficult, especially for integrations and API keys. But it was a completely different experience to self-hosting, where a single incorrect space in a YAML file can make it impossible to deploy an entire container.

5. You don’t have to publish an app to use it

As mentioned earlier, I don’t publish my web apps for the public to use because I am worried about potential vulnerabilities. But this doesn’t mean that I can’t use them. In AI Studio, I can use my app by visiting its share link without needing to publish it. I can also share this link with other accounts and give them access. I mostly just tested this with my secondary Gmail account, since I only created the spreadsheet analyzer for myself.

There are slight drawbacks to using apps this way. The chat for Gemini appears when you access the app, meaning that I don’t get a clean, focused UI by default. However, I usually just switch the app to full-screen mode or minimize the chat to get around this.

I’m willing to deal with the slight inconvenience to keep my apps private, since I don’t want any important information to be potentially exposed. I also don’t upload any sensitive information or documents to the app.

If you want to play around with some personal apps, you don’t have to worry about making them public. Keeping them in the demo mode works for most tasks.

I honestly expected vibe coding to be a lot more complex than it turned out to be. I had a short course to guide me, but this differed from the days of research I’ve spent on self-hosting. If you’ve been hesitant to try it out because you don’t have coding experience, I recommend starting with a beginner-friendly tool.

I’m personally excited to create more apps that solve niche issues I encounter, especially now that AI Studio allows you to create Android apps.