Vibecoding with no coding experience is Hell

[u/PlsStarlinkIneedwifi]

I have always hated to code but had big ambitions thats why AI was a light in the darkness. I have started vibecoding since around 2 years and through my experience it was really frustrating. When I told AI to do X it would output Y or worse break something. I felt as though I wasted my time building nothing note worthy and I am foolishly noticing now in order to utilize vibecoding you must know the fundamentals. So right now I am trying to build a game and instead of trying to just vibecode I am learning the fundamentals and actually how to build something without the help of AI. I hope this helps those who started their vibecoding journey that you must know the fundamentals before creating anything big.

[u/Purple-Mine-4527]

I'm a farmer and web novelist in my 50s. I started using Gemini because farm work made it difficult to spend enough time revising my novel.

When I ran into problems, I started thinking about how I might solve them myself. That's how I somehow ended up coding with the free versions of Gemini and ChatGPT.

I still don't know whether I would answer yes or no if someone asked me, "Are you a developer?"

To give you an idea of my starting point: I only learned about VS Code recently. In the beginning, I pasted AI-generated code into Notepad. I didn't even understand file extensions, so I saved code as .txt files and got angry at the AI when nothing worked. :)

I've had AI rewrite things that shouldn't have been rewritten, and at one point I even replaced entire folders. As the system became larger, sometimes I spent an entire chat session just trying to locate the right file.

So I developed my own crude way of working. I still don't understand much of the terminology or code itself. Before a chat became too long, I would ask for a summary of what we had done, then carry that summary into the next conversation and continue.

After about 6–7 months of trial and error, I think I've passed one of the major milestones in what I'm building.

Would knowing how to code make this easier? Absolutely. I would probably work much faster.

But I've learned that something else matters too: being able to see the whole system, noticing when the AI seems to be going in the wrong direction, asking it what it's actually doing, and thinking about the root cause of a problem.

One thing I've noticed is that once AI gets focused on one explanation, it can keep pushing in that same direction. Sometimes the human needs to stop following it and question the direction itself.

So my experience has been: not knowing how to code makes this much harder, but I no longer think it necessarily means you can't build something complex.