Vibe coded in under 24 hours

by Nick

Someone pointed out this week that I built this whole site, the one that teaches you to vibe code, in under 24 hours. I'd had my head down building it, so I hadn't really stopped to think about that. But it's true, and it's about the most honest pitch for vibe coding I've got, so I figured I'd write it down.

Here's what actually got built that first day, working with my AI inside VS Code:

• A custom CMS. Not a rented one, my own. I create and edit every course and lesson right in the admin.
• A lesson editor with live preview. Markdown on one side, the formatted lesson on the other, plus image uploads.
• Course management: create, reorder, publish, organize.
• Real auth. Sign up, log in, password reset, the whole session setup.
• Subscription tiers built into the data model. Everything is free right now, but the plumbing for paid tiers is already there if I ever want it.
• Fourteen courses worth of structure, ready to fill in.

Then there's the stuff you don't see: a Postgres database, transactional email, video infrastructure, analytics, all deployed to production on a real domain.

And the only thing keeping it running is the ~$10/year domain. No platform, no lock-in. I could cancel every subscription I pay for and the site would still be sitting right here. (Which, if you've read the manifesto, is sort of the whole point.)

I'm writing this down because I think a lot of people hear "vibe coding" and picture a toy. Some weekend project that falls apart the moment a real person tries to use it. So here's a real one. A production app, built quickly, by telling an AI what to build instead of typing out every line myself.

If a learning platform with its own CMS, real auth, and a full content pipeline can come together in a day, you can probably guess what you'd be able to build once you actually understand what you're handing your AI. That's what the courses are for. Not to teach you to write code from memory, but so you know what to ask for, and what's going on when the AI builds it.

f*ck it, we vibe.