Vibe Coding Beginner's Guide: A Complete Hands-On Tutorial for Building Websites with AI from Scratch

What is Vibe Coding

You have zero coding knowledge, yet you want your own website or web application? Today, that's no longer a pipe dream. The core idea behind Vibe Coding is simple: describe your ideas in natural language, and let AI turn them into real, working products.

The concept of Vibe Coding was formally introduced by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. He described a completely new programming paradigm: instead of writing code line by line, developers fully immerse themselves in the "vibe," express their intent in natural language, and let large language models (LLMs) handle the generation, debugging, and iteration of code. Behind this concept is the leapfrog improvement in code generation model capabilities in recent years — from early GitHub Copilot to GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, AI has reached a remarkably high level in understanding context and generating complete functional modules. Vibe Coding is essentially the ultimate application of "Prompt Engineering" in software development scenarios, lowering the cognitive barrier of programming from "mastering syntax and logic" to "clearly expressing requirements," enabling non-technical people to participate in software creation.

A blogger named Daya, who describes himself as "a complete beginner who knows nothing about technical code," built multiple high-quality websites and web applications using nothing but AI. Through practice, he discovered that AI's programming capabilities are getting stronger, and its aesthetic sense has also improved dramatically — effortlessly producing page designs more refined than many common websites.

Tool Selection and Setup

This hands-on tutorial uses Kimi's Agent feature. Unlike traditional AI conversations (such as regular ChatGPT chats), AI Agents have a complete "plan-execute-feedback" closed-loop capability: they can autonomously break down complex tasks, call external tools (such as code interpreters, file systems, browsers), and iterate continuously until the task is complete. This architecture technically relies on mechanisms like "Function Calling" and "Chain of Thought," transforming AI from a "responder" into a true "executor." There are several practical reasons for choosing Kimi Agent:

• Stability for long-running tasks: Less likely to break down mid-project when handling complex work
• Local modifications don't break the whole: Optimizing a specific detail won't destroy other completed parts
• Cloud-based execution: The entire project runs on Kimi's servers — code compilation, preview, and debugging all happen server-side, so it doesn't tax your local computer's performance and is more secure
• Ready out of the box: Log into the Kimi website, click "Website" in the left navigation bar, and you're ready to start

The platform also provides a batch of ready-made templates — you can preview the results first and use them directly if they suit your needs.

Key Tips for Your First AI Communication

Clarify Your Requirements and Express Them in Natural Language

For zero-experience users, this first step of communicating with AI is especially important. Before getting started, think through a few things:

• What type of product do you want to build (personal website, online resume, small tool, etc.)
• What features do you need
• Roughly what pages should be included
• What design style do you expect

Using the blogger's hands-on example, he described his requirements like this: "I want a personal website with a strong sense of technology and artistry. The blogger's name is Daya." This single short sentence includes the product type (personal website), core information (blogger's name), and style direction (tech + artistic).

He then added details about the specific content for each page, descriptions of the hero video animation, and other specifics. It's worth noting that Kimi can automatically generate hero video animations — you just need to briefly describe the visuals in text.

The Most Critical Sentence: Let AI Understand Before It Acts

This is the core insight the blogger distilled from over three months of Vibe Coding practice — at the end of your requirement description, always add this sentence:

"Now please understand my requirements. If there's any information you're unsure about, feel free to ask me questions. Start executing only after we've fully communicated and confirmed everything."

This sentence prevents AI from rushing to write code, instead making it digest the requirements first and proactively ask you clarifying questions. From a technical perspective, this type of instruction is a "Meta-Prompt" — a prompt that controls AI's behavioral mode rather than directly describing task content. After receiving instructions, large language models default to generating output immediately. When requirements are ambiguous, the model fills in gaps based on "most common patterns" from training data, often causing output to deviate from the user's true intent. By explicitly requiring AI to "ask questions and confirm before executing," you're essentially forcing it into an information-gathering phase, highly analogous to the "requirements analysis" phase in software engineering. Research shows that adding such meta-prompts significantly improves first-attempt completion quality for complex tasks and reduces subsequent iteration rounds. This way, the first demo delivered will be much closer to expectations, avoiding AI filling in the blanks and producing something that veers off course.

Hands-On Process and Results

AI's Workflow

After sending the requirements, Kimi quickly understood the intent and raised three confirmation questions (such as how to display social media metrics). After replying with confirmations, AI officially began executing the task.

At the top of the right-side preview panel, you can see AI's work plan in real time — which modules it plans to build, how far each step has progressed. The entire interaction process is quite transparent.

Website Results Preview

After completion, the website results were impressive:

• The hero section features a video animation that perfectly matches the description (overhead shot zooming in from far away to the photographer)
• A slogan and copy were automatically generated in the bottom-left corner
• The page has smooth scroll transition animations
• The social media metrics display area is beautifully designed

What to Do When You Hit a Bug? A Screenshot + Description Is Enough

During the hands-on process, an issue was found with the brand marquee area display. The fix was incredibly simple:

1. Take a screenshot and send it directly to AI
2. Describe the specific problem you see
3. Explain the fix you expect

No need to say "use what CSS property" or "change which line of code" — just describe it in everyday language. The blogger fixed it in a single round this time. The marquee gained gradient effects, light-dark variations, and color depth changes — the details were handled beautifully.

More Possibilities: Building Lightweight Web Apps with AI

Beyond personal websites, the blogger also used the same approach to build a web-based personal diary application, and it worked on the first generation:

• Complete calendar interface
• Automatically designed UI, icons, and text layout
• Support for recording titles and body content
• Can be downloaded to run locally, with data stored entirely on your own computer — no privacy concerns

Behind "data stored entirely on your own computer" is the browser's native local storage technology. Modern browsers provide multiple client-side storage solutions: localStorage is suitable for storing simple key-value pair data; IndexedDB is a complete browser-built-in database that supports structured data storage with capacity up to hundreds of megabytes. These applications require no server, no account registration, no cloud data upload, and are fully usable offline. Users simply download the HTML/JS files to their local machine and open them in a browser to run — privacy is far superior to most cloud-based SaaS tools.

The blogger describes this as "a little spiritual corner on your computer" — a completely private recording space that belongs entirely to you.

Core Principles of Vibe Coding Summarized

Vibe Coding has no steep learning curve. The core boils down to three points:

1. Communicate in natural language: Say what's in your head — even incomplete descriptions are fine
2. Let AI proactively ask you questions: Turn yourself into the "interviewee"