The best vibe coding tools, and the decisions they can’t make

Which vibe coding tool or platform is best?

Here’s how I’d choose, by what you’re actually building.

Vibe coding with Claude, Gemini or Cursor

People search for these by name, so here’s the plain difference. Claude and Gemini are the AI models, the part that writes the code. Cursor is an editor that lets a model work inside your project’s files. Claude Code does the same thing from Anthropic directly. In practice, the model matters less than how much of your project the tool can see and whether you can undo what it did.

How to start vibe coding

1. Pick one small, real thing. Not “an app”. A booking page for your business, or a price calculator for your team.
2. Pick one tool from the table and stay with it for the first project. Switching tools every week is how people end up with a folder full of half-finished experiments.
3. Describe it like you’d brief a person. Who it’s for, what they do on the page, what should happen after.
4. Save a version every time something works. Most tools have version history. Use it, or connect GitHub.
5. Put it in front of one real person before you add anything else.

Is vibe coding bad? What breaks with real users

Vibe coding isn’t bad. Shipping something you don’t understand to real customers can be. The things that usually break:

• A change that fixes one page quietly breaks another, and there’s no way back to this morning’s version.
• Private keys or passwords end up in the code, where anyone can find them.
• A form collects customer details with nothing stopping bots or anyone reading them.
• It works for you and fails on a phone, or when a few people use it at the same time.

None of these are hard to prevent. They’re just rarely explained until they happen.

Vibe coding security: what to check before launch

Before anything with customer details goes live, check these:

1. No secret keys in the code. Ask the AI directly: “Are there any API keys or passwords in this project? Move them somewhere safe.”
2. Who can see the data. Ask: “Can a logged-out visitor read or change anything they shouldn’t?”
3. Forms can’t be abused. Spam protection on every public form.
4. You have backups and history, so a bad change can be rolled back in minutes.
5. Someone who understands it has looked, if you’re taking payments or storing sensitive data.

Vibe coding best practices

Keep each ask small, and save a version whenever it works. Test on your phone as well as your laptop, because that’s where most people will see it. Write down what the thing is supposed to do in one paragraph and give it to the AI at the start of every session, so it doesn’t drift. And when the AI offers you three ways to do something, ask it what each one costs you later, not just which is fastest.

The four decisions no vibe coding tool makes for you

Code was the fast part, and you’ve already proved that. The time goes somewhere else:

1. Where your data lives. Your customer list in a spreadsheet, a database, or someone else’s server changes what you can do later.
2. What happens when it breaks. At a bad moment, with a customer waiting, who notices and how do you get back?
3. How it grows. What works for a handful of people might not work for many, and rebuilding later often costs more than building it properly now.
4. What’s secure. Who can see what, and what happens if a key leaks.

AI will give you an answer to every one of these. It just doesn’t know your business, so it can’t tell you which answer is right for you.

When to hire a developer after vibe coding

When the thing you built starts holding real customers, real money or real data, it’s worth having someone look at those four decisions. And know what you’re paying for: not someone to write more code, but someone to undo the guesses before they cost you. If what you built is a website, a form or follow-up for your business, that’s exactly the kind of work I do.