Vibe Coding: Building a Personal Blog from Scratch

A developer used Google AI Studio's Build mode to create a personal blog from scratch, treating the AI as a high-speed collaborator rather than a replacement for software understanding. The approach involved describing intent over implementation, reviewing AI-generated code like pull requests, and maintaining architectural ownership to avoid bugs. The resulting React-based blog was deployed to a .ai.studio subdomain, demonstrating a workflow that prioritizes prompt engineering and manual intervention over fully automated generation.

Vibe Coding: Building a Personal Blog from Scratch My Approach to Vibe Coding There is a misconception that vibe coding replaces the need to understand software. In my experience, it's more about treating the AI as a literal, high-speed collaborator. The AI can spin up structure instantly, but it has no concept of what "good" means for a specific project and frequently misses its own bugs. My actual AI workflow looked like this: Intent over Implementation: I described what the blog should do , not which specific components to use. PR-Style Review: I treated every generation as a pull request that needed approval before being merged. Architectural Ownership: I made the final calls on page routing and content structure. Manual Intervention: If a feature "looked" right in the preview but was logically flawed, I stepped in to rewrite the code. The real skill here isn't writing less code; it's prompt engineering and knowing exactly when to stop trusting the preview and start reading the source. The Tech Stack and Execution I used Google AI Studio's Build mode to generate a React application. For those unfamiliar, this isn't a black box; it provides a chat panel alongside a live code editor and a preview pane. One specific feature that actually saves time is the annotation mode, which lets you click an element in the preview to request a change rather than trying to describe the UI location in text. To keep the project stable, I avoided a custom backend. A blog is the perfect test case for this because the content is the priority, not the underlying platform. Here is the general structure of the prompt I used to kick off the build: Build a minimal, modern personal blog in React. Home page: list of posts with title, date, short excerpt. Post page: full article content, clean typography, no sidebar. The result was a fast, readable site deployed to a .ai.studio subdomain. By keeping the scope narrow and the requirements explicit, I avoided the "hallucination loop" that often happens with larger, more complex AI-generated apps. Next Skim: My BYOK AI Email Client for Windows → /en/threads/2653/