Vibe coding with Replit
1. Vibe coding with Replit
Welcome to vibe coding with Replit. My name is Matt Palmer and I'll be your instructor for the course. I currently lead developer relations at Replit, and I'm also a producer and author on topics like vibe coding and data transformation. In this course we'll talk about the vibe coding mindset and how to approach it with Replit, as well as prompt and context engineering best practices for vibe coding. We'll also build a few complex software applications using Replit, and then talk about how to secure, deploy and maintain those apps after you've built them. We'll build everything from a simple application like this meditation timer with a nice breathing animation to a more complex app like this form submission application. We'll focus on design best practices, as well as some of the more nuanced implementation components. And for this app, that'll include an admin dashboard, which necessitates authentication or user sign in for our application, and allows us to manage the status of those different form submissions as well as a form builder that actually allows us to customize the questions we're asking our users in real time. Now all you'll need for this course is a browser, your curiosity and an account on Replit. When you complete the course successfully, we'll provide you with a discounted month of Replit Core. Now let's talk a bit about what Vibe Coding is and why we're going to learn it. The truth is, the way we build is changing, and now anybody can create not just software engineers. Code used to require technical expertise. Development often required skilled engineers to fill out everything. This is how I learned how to code. Even simple prototypes or internal tools required a lot of knowledge. The analogy I like to use is that it was kind of like building a car engine from scratch. It was highly technical. It was very time consuming. It was really performance oriented, and a lot of code is performance oriented, but vibe coding just means leaning on AI, an AI co-pilot to do the work for us while we act as an architect or a manager. I'd say this is more like relying on a mechanic to build your engine and handle all the details while you focus on design and problem solving. So vibe coding is a new technique where we're acting as managers and using AI to write code. Now, if we think about this in the context of building an app. Traditionally that looks like gathering requirements and then handing those requirements off to a design team. From there, that design team would develop a design and then hand that off to a software engineering team who would then build a prototype. Finally, the cycle would repeat itself, iterating with feedback until you achieve the outcome that you're after. For example, if you're building a customer feedback tracker. This is a traditional approach with multiple handoffs, a long development lifecycle, and an instance where you're very detached from the actual problem you're trying to solve. Now in Vibe coding, we still do all these things, but you are the one doing them. That means there's fewer or no handoffs and there's rapid iteration with a real focus on the problem that you're solving. So the workflows in Vibe coding aren't different from traditional software development, but now you can build faster. So what does good vibe coding look like? Well, good vibe coding starts with a problem. You are the one closest to the problems, so you'll have the most knowledge about their solution. And even though you're working by yourself, communication is still key, but now you're communicating with AI instead of with your colleagues. Finally, the four P approach is a structured way to think about communication that we'll talk about in this course. So when should you vibe code? Rapid prototyping is an excellent use case. If you're trying to turn an idea into a functional prototype, maybe like a test landing page or a sales calculator, vibe coding can help accelerate that prototyping phase. Internal tools are another great time to vibe code if you're trying to replicate traditional software or maybe build out tools that don't exist yet. Vibe coding can help you get more stuff done, and I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. Finally, exploration. If you have an idea that you've always had but never knew how to express vibe coding can help you do that, maybe even validate that it's an idea worth pursuing. Now, let's set some expectations. While vibe coding tools are powerful, they might not be perfect for delicate or sophisticated infrastructure. Currently that's still outside the scope of most vibe coding tools. Extremely high volume or scale applications also require a lot of additional consideration. So we're not gonna build Uber overnight for this course. Yet. And finally, business critical or sensitive data requires extreme attention to detail. You absolutely can vibe code with sensitive data, but you need to be incredibly careful about how you implement it. So what is vibe coding? It's a modern technique for development where you're acting as a manager with superpowers and you're focusing on ideas instead of actual code implementation. So before we jump in, we should talk about what Replit is. And at a very high level, Replit is an all-in-one vibe coding tool, and it runs in your browser, which means there's no installation or setup. You just go to Replit.com and it allows you to prompt AI to build entire applications. Now, under the hood, as we'll see, these are all powered by code, so if you really want to edit code or learn, you can do just that on Replit, like any other code editor. Replit also has all the tools you need to build an application. That means it has deployments. You can take your app and you can publish it or make it live. It has databases, so you can persistently store data. We'll use those in this course. And it also has tools like authentication for adding in users and secrets management for storing sensitive data. We'll also learn about those throughout the course. And finally, Replit allows you to build powerful web apps because it has all of these tools, because it runs in the browser and you don't need to know how to code, Replit is really a Swiss Army knife for vibe coding and building, and that means people like PMs or designers, really anyone can use Replit to build, prototype their ideas, build out internal tools, and ship faster. But that's enough talk. Let's build our application.2. Let's practice!
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