No Devs? No problem. Just Vibes.

I used to pitch lead-gen tools in decks. Now I build them between meetings.

This week, I had an idea for a small-but-mighty app. A deceptively simple tool that could offer real value to users and quietly capture leads in the background. Something that, in any normal company, would take three months of backlog wrangling and a reluctant blessing from product. Instead, I had zero dev resources, zero budget, and even less patience. So I did what every marketer secretly dreams of: I built it myself.

Not with Python or React or whatever the cool kids are using on GitHub. I used something better: a growing constellation of tools that let you skip the ticket queue, bypass the platform team, and get straight to the good part—shipping. Some call it no-code. Some call it low-code. But increasingly, it’s being called Vibe Coding, and once you taste it, there’s no going back.

Escape from PowerPoint Island

Before I learned to build, I did what many marketers do: I pitched. Beautifully. Strategically. Repeatedly. I spent years at legacy institutions—places like McKinsey & Company—where intelligence is prized, but inertia is practically baked into the walls. Strategy is the product. Execution is someone else’s department.

Even the most reasonable ideas—like, say, spinning up an internal dashboard or building a value calculator to support sales—required a 17-step process that involved approvals, roadmaps, and a fresh deck every two weeks. It was death by alignment.

So when I transitioned into startup leadership, I brought the frameworks with me—but left the patience behind. I didn’t want to pitch tools anymore. I wanted to launch them. Enter: Vibe Coding.

Lovable, Base44, Gemini, and Me

The first platform I fell in love with (no pun intended) was Lovable. If Figma and Webflow had a baby that actually shipped things, this would be it. Within hours, I had built two separate dashboards—both designed to generate leads and provide lightweight value upfront. They looked clean, worked flawlessly, and required zero engineering input. Frankly, they could have passed as standalone SaaS products.

Lovable made me feel like I had a designer and a dev in my browser tab. Everything about it said, yes, you know what good looks like—and now you can make it real.

Eventually, I hit some edges. Lovable is great for velocity and polish, but when you need deeper logic, conditional flows, or anything resembling a database relationship, you start wanting more muscle. That’s when I turned to Base44.

Base44 was less flashy, but more foundational. It gave me structure, rules, and the kind of backend logic you assume only an engineer can build. Yes, I had to bring my own design sensibility. Yes, there were moments of mild friction. But I could build something that scaled, something that felt like it could live beyond an MVP, something I could hand to a dev later without shame.

And then there was Gemini. Not a builder, but a creative enabler. Think: a nonjudgmental cofounder who’s always down to riff. I used Gemini to outline user flows, challenge assumptions, and get unstuck at 11:37 PM on a Tuesday. It didn’t write code, but it helped me decide what was worth coding—or rather, dragging and dropping.

Why Vibe Coding Is More Than a Trend

Vibe Coding isn’t a gimmick. It’s a power shift.

For the first time, people like me—marketers, strategists, design-literate leaders—can stop being product-adjacent and start being product-active. We’re not just shaping the pitch. We’re shaping the product. That app you floated in the growth meeting? You can launch it by Friday. That onboarding flow you mocked in Figma? It’s live by lunch.

In the past, execution was a bottleneck. Today, it’s a browser window.

The New Default

If this all sounds like a subtle rebellion, it is. A rebellion against delay. Against overcomplication. Against the idea that you need permission—or a roadmap—to build something useful.

Vibe Coding doesn’t mean you don’t need engineers. You do. You will. But it does mean you don’t have to wait for them to validate a hypothesis or bring a clever tool to life. You can prototype publicly. You can learn faster. You can operate in a way that makes even small ideas feel big—without layers of process smothering the spark.

This is how modern marketing will get built. Not by sitting in the backlog. Not by pitching ideas up the chain. But by launching them, live, on your own terms.

Vibe Coding is the new default. And it’s working.