Vibe Coding for design: a few things I've learned

My first post: why I went from designing by hand to vibe coding.

Alright, yes. This is my first post. I'd been thinking about writing something for a while, and in the end I decided to start with what's actually kept me busy these past months: dropping designing by hand and starting to do vibe coding. So welcome — and forgive me if I ramble, it's the first time and I'm still getting the hang of this.

I'll tell you exactly how it went, no posturing. I'm no design or development guru: I'm just someone who wanted to ship things and kept bumping into his own limits along the way.

What I mean by "designing by hand"

When I say "designing by hand" I don't mean pencil and paper. I mean sitting down to build every screen piece by piece: placing each component, tweaking every margin, fussing over every interaction. I lived it first in Figma, and then in Framer when I wanted a bit more motion. Tools I genuinely love, mind you. But the two share one thing: the outcome depends on how much time and care you pour into it by hand.

And that was my problem.

The love (and the gridlock) of doing it all by hand

I have real love for Figma. You open it and you go "I feel great working in here". I had beautiful designs, screens that were a pleasure to look at… and then nothing. Pretty, sure. But still. They didn't move, didn't respond, weren't real.

So I jumped to Framer looking for that more dynamic feel. And at first, great. But here comes the honest part: I don't do this full-time. I do it in pockets, between a thousand other things. And the moment I wanted anything slightly more complicated, things would jam up. Attempts, errors, back to the start. I was spending more time fighting with the how than moving forward with the what.

It's not the tools' fault. I was asking a by-hand process for things that needed time I simply didn't have.

The jump to vibe coding

And here's the turn. There came a point where I thought: "I need to ship something, now." Not the perfect design, not the magazine-grade animation. Something that works and that I can show.

That's where vibe coding won me over. You tell it what you want, almost like you'd explain it to a friend, and you start seeing results. You iterate by talking, not by fighting with menus and properties you can't find. And the things that used to lock me up by hand were half-solved in a moment.

I'm not going to sell it as magic, or pretend everything comes out right on the first try (spoiler: it doesn't). But the feeling of moving forward instead of getting stuck was exactly what I needed.

The good (and the not-so-good)

The funny thing is how different it feels when things get harder. Designing by hand, the more ambitious the project got, the faster my frustration rose. With vibe coding it goes up too, of course, but much more slowly: the slope doesn't get as steep.

That said, I'll tell you too: with vibe coding you lose some of that fine control. The pixel precision, the care in every animation… it isn't the same. There's a trade-off there, and it would be dishonest not to call it out.

So, which one is better?

Neither. Or both, depending on what for. I've realised it isn't a war: designing by hand wins on visual care and control, and vibe coding wins on speed to put something out there. And when you're not dedicating 100 % of your time to it, that speed isn't a luxury: it's what makes the difference between shipping or leaving the project in a drawer.

What I'm taking with me

If I had to keep one idea, it would be this: there's nothing wrong with taking the shortcut when the shortcut lets you finish. For a long time I felt that "the right thing" was doing everything by hand, with care, down to the last pixel. And it turns out the right thing, at least for me, was finishing things.

Vibe coding hasn't made me a better designer. It's made me someone who ships. And for a first post, on a blog I've just opened, that feels like a fine moral to start with.

Thanks for reading this far. See you in the next one.