Vibe coding in plain words: a site or a bot in one evening

What vibe coding is: how to build a site or Telegram bot with AI in an evening, which tools to pick, our own measurements and the risks.

Vibe coding in plain words: a site or a bot in one evening

In short:

  • vibe coding means you describe in words what you need, AI writes the code, you run it, look, and ask for fixes; the term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025;
  • one page or a simple bot is realistic for an evening; payments, a customer database and security are not;
  • the key skill is not "writing a prompt" but checking the result: run it, read it, roll it back.

Put simply, vibe coding is a conversation with a programmer who types very fast and never gets tired. You say: "I need a page with my services, a Telegram booking button, dark theme." It gives you code. You open the result, see the button is in the wrong place, and write: "move the button up, bigger font". You may never read the code. You are still the one answerable for the result.

Karpathy introduced the word in a post on 2 February 2025, describing work where you "forget that the code even exists". By the end of 2025 Collins Dictionary named "vibe coding" its word of the year. Below: what one evening looks like, what breaks, and what we measured ourselves.

What happens in one evening

We have not timed an "evening" with a stopwatch, so we promise no hours. The order that works with any tool is the same:

  1. One sentence about the result. Not "I want a website" but "a one-page site for a barbershop: services, prices, a Telegram button".
  2. Plan first, code second. Ask the AI to list the steps and write nothing. Cross out the extras right away; it costs nothing.
  3. One page or one bot scenario. Expand later.
  4. Run it and look with your own eyes. Click every button. Ask the AI: "explain step by step what this file does". If you do not understand the answer, you are not ready to answer for it.
  5. Save the working version (git, or at least a copy of the folder) before the next edit.
  6. Publish. At MarsHub this is one command: marshub deploy --name my-name. The folder becomes a site at my-name.marshub.uz with HTTPS, and the last 5 versions are kept for rollback.

For a bot the path is the same, except you have a script instead of a page, and you get the token from @BotFather in Telegram (docs). The token is a password: do not paste it into an AI chat or put it in a public repository.

Which tool to pick

In the Mars AI Operator course programme, vibe coding is the first of three tracks: sites, landing pages, bots, mini-services; the example tools listed are Lovable, Cursor, v0, Replit and Claude Code. They have different characters:

  • Lovable, Replit, v0 build the app in the browser, nothing to install. Good for a first try. Lovable has a free tier with daily credits; Replit's paid Core plan starts at $20 a month.
  • Cursor and Claude Code work with real files on your computer: Cursor has a free tier, paid plans from $20 a month, Claude Code is included in the Claude Pro subscription ($20). More flexible, but you need a little terminal.

Prices change, so check the sites (links below). Before paying by Uzcard or Humo, confirm the service accepts that card: paying for foreign services from Uzbekistan remains the main difficulty, and the course covers it in week one.

What we measured ourselves

We develop with a coding agent ourselves, and in July 2026 we counted where the limit goes. Three weeks in a row, 95-96% of usage was not what the model writes but re-reading what had already been said in the conversation: 121-174 re-read tokens per one written token. Across our 200 sessions the median peak context is 107 thousand tokens, and every fifth session goes past 200 thousand.

Three practical takeaways for a beginner:

  • A long conversation gets pricier and dumber. One task, one chat. Finished the page? Start a new chat with a short summary.
  • Do not ask it to "read the whole project". Reading whole files gave 42% of the context volume (780 calls), while 6,732 terminal commands gave only 21%.
  • Saving without checking the result is worth nothing. One "economy" mode in our own development cut tokens by 50%, but the agent gave up earlier and the task stayed unsolved. So we look at two numbers: spend and whether the task is solved.

What vibe coding will not do: the risks

Karpathy himself wrote that the approach is fine for throwaway weekend projects. That is an honest frame.

  • Security. Veracode's 2025 study tested code from more than 100 models on 80 tasks: in 45% of cases the code contained a vulnerability. Checking your page "by eye" will not catch this.
  • Secrets. Do not give passwords, bot tokens and API keys to the AI, and do not publish them. Do not paste customers' personal data into a chat either; in the course this is a separate topic in lesson two.
  • Money and customer data. Taking payments, storing other people's data, medicine and finance need a person who understands the code and answers for it.
  • An agent can do damage. In July 2025 Replit's AI agent deleted a production database during Jason Lemkin's experiment, even though it had been told not to change anything without permission. The lesson is simple: a test copy separate from live data, and a backup before every edit.
  • Maintenance. A page you do not understand breaks exactly when you need to change a price urgently.

We do not promise that after one evening you become a programmer or find a job through it. It is a way to get a working prototype fast and to understand how the thing you are asking for is built.

Where our students already do this

We give children the same technique: in the browser-based Mars Code a child describes an idea, AI generates, and a working game or site comes out. Examples of games built by a Mars student sit at damin.marshub.uz. With children there is one rule: they must explain every line themselves.

If you want to go through it with a mentor

Vibe coding is the sixth, final lesson of the Mars AI Operator course: a site or bot with a real launch and a demo day. Pre-registration is open now, and the start date has not been announced. If you are interested, leave a request at ai.marsit.uz.

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