The rise of vibe coding is based on the promise of services like GPT-5: that in the future, you won’t have to know how to program at all in order to “create” software — you’ll just need to know how to communicate your software ideas in plain old English. The AI will do all the programming and debugging for you.
The ultimate goal: “software on demand,” or any kind of app, website, or visualization you can dream up, whenever you want it. But how close are we? If you’re totally new to coding and don’t want to learn how to code yourself, should you expect to get something usable? I set out to try some of the bigger consumer AI services to see how they perform. In short, I’m looking for the best vibe coding tools for beginners, not more advanced tools like Cursor or Windsurf.
For these tests, I used GPT-5, Claude 4.1 Opus, and Grok 4 (Expert).
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