I want to tell you about something that would have taken me three weeks and a freelance developer six months ago, and that I knocked out in a single afternoon last month.
I built a custom WordPress theme from scratch. From zero to a live, polished, fully responsive site. And I did it through what I can only describe as “vibe coding” — a term I’ve been seeing circulate in the AI community to describe the process of building software through natural language conversation rather than writing code directly.
What is Vibe Coding, Exactly?
The concept is simple: instead of writing code yourself, you describe what you want to an AI — conversationally, the way you’d brief a developer — and the AI writes the code. You review, test, iterate, and refine through dialogue. You’re not copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers or reading PHP documentation. You’re having a conversation about what you want and why.
For experienced developers, this might sound like a productivity tool. For someone like me — a digital transformation specialist whose technical background is in enterprise architecture and AEM configuration, not front-end development — it’s something more significant. It’s access.
The Actual Process
Here’s how it actually went. I started by describing the aesthetic I wanted. Dark background, gold accents, something that felt editorial and smart rather than generic-blogger. The AI suggested specific design tokens: a near-black background (#0c0e14), gold at #c9a84c, Playfair Display for headlines, DM Sans for body text. I could see exactly what it was doing and why, and I could push back or refine at each step.
Then we moved into structure. What sections does the homepage need? How should the hero be laid out? What’s the right approach to showing posts — one featured card, then a grid? Each question got a considered answer, often with tradeoffs explained.
Then came the actual code. File by file: style.css, functions.php, header.php, index.php, template parts, JavaScript for animations. Hundreds of lines of PHP and CSS that I could read, roughly understand, and interrogate when something seemed off.
When bugs appeared — and they did — I described what I was seeing and got specific fixes. “The timeline is only showing one item instead of four.” Fixed. “There’s a duplicate LinkedIn link in the nav.” Fixed. “The stats bar text isn’t visible on scroll.” Diagnosed as a JavaScript observer issue, fixed with a CSS-based animation instead.
What Made it Work
A few things made this process actually effective rather than just theoretically interesting:
Having enough context to have an opinion. I’ve worked in digital for 15 years. I understand information architecture, UX principles, content hierarchy, and brand presentation. I didn’t know how to write PHP, but I knew what the output should feel like and I could evaluate it. Vibe coding works best when you bring genuine judgment to the conversation — not just “make it look good” but “here’s why this specific layout serves the content and the reader.”
Being specific about intent, not just features. “I want a dark theme” produces something generic. “I want something that signals deep expertise without feeling cold or corporate — think editorial rather than SaaS landing page” produces something that actually fits. The more precise your intent, the more useful the output.
Staying in the loop on decisions. At every fork — design direction, technical approach, how to handle edge cases — I was actively choosing, not just rubber-stamping. The AI proposed, I evaluated, we refined. It wasn’t hands-off; it was collaborative.
Where This Points
My background is in helping enterprises figure out how to actually implement new technology — not just adopt tools, but change processes and ways of working. And what strikes me about vibe coding isn’t the technical novelty. It’s the process shift.
For years, the gap between “I have an idea” and “the idea exists as a working thing” has required either technical skills or money to hire technical skills. That gap is collapsing. Not disappearing — judgment, taste, and domain knowledge still matter enormously — but the technical execution barrier is dropping fast.
For individuals, that means more agency. For organizations, it means rethinking where technical bottlenecks actually live, and what skills will matter most as those bottlenecks shift.
I built a blog theme. But the more interesting thing I built was a working mental model of what becomes possible when execution stops being the limiting factor. I’ll be exploring that question a lot more in the posts ahead.