The Marketer's Guide to Vibe Coding: Automating Marketing with AI-Generated Code

I once saw a guy named Pat rocking a pair of aviators, leaned back at a near horizontal plane in a Herman-Miller chair, typing out code on a mechanical keyboard.

It was certainly the coolest thing I had seen before, and it may be the coolest thing I'll ever see again.

His vibe - rockstar; his purpose - business operations; his tools - anything that could be automated via API.

All Pat needed was a well stocked office snack cupboard, a cup of strong black coffee, and an audience. I was happy to provide all of those.

This was 2015, a time before it was commonplace to have a developer on the sales and marketing operations team. The challenges he faced are the same we face today: consolidating business data, automated workflows, and making sure the trains ran on time. He wasn't a member of marketing officially, but we made common cause (and not just when it came to depleting our snack reserves).

His role was so unique and prized that our CEO even wrote a blog post about hiring him. I guess Pat now has at least two blogs written in his honour.

We likened his appearance on our team like the arrival of Spiderman – a web slinger who traversed skyscrapers of data to save the day. Combining his development knowledge with our marketing use cases felt like a superpower at the time. While we had our share of unintended consequences as we set up various systems and hacks, we made significant progress in levelling up our processes.

For example, we once hacked together Google Tag Manager and Marketo forms to set up an event tracking system for our SaaS application. The workflow was simple: Google Tag Manager listened to events in the application (eg, user actions) and then submitted a Marketo form containing that information. It was immediately impactful and allowed us to set up segmentations based on user behaviour in our marketing automation system.

We wasted little time in making use of this data and started setting up nurture programs, triggered emails, and analytics. This was before tools like Mixpanel and Inflection were commonplace, mind you, so the solution was pretty innovative. Honestly, it was an epic hack and produced tangible business results.

This system, however, had its flaws. The combined weight of GTM and Marketo in our application slowed performance considerably, and soon was selected by our dev team for removal. It's hard to argue against user experience, and our acquiescence was for the greater good. Disappointed, we moved onto our next hack.

Why do I share this story? In 2015, this would have been considered a growth hack, but now it's part of a widely accepted discipline known as product-led marketing. The hacks of yesteryear were done in an environment that simply lacked the tooling and organizational structure to support more mature methodologies. Innovation often looks like a 'hack' when it's really just pushing the boundaries of tech to achieve an objective.

Enter Vibe Coding. This is a term that has gained traction in recent months and strikes me as remarkably similar to the growth hacking error of years past. It's a trendy term that is often used pejoratively and dismissively, but also speaks truthfully to a changing digital environment. Growth hacking is a term that has fallen out of vogue, and for good reason. We're not hacking anything: we're just doing good digital marketing.

Vibe coding – and by extension, vibe marketing, vibe sales, vibe vibing – is a bad term for an important innovation. Maybe I'll warm up to the term, but for now, I think I'm not loving it in part because it lessens the impact of what it can do.

Let's unpack this term a bit and see how it applies to digital marketing.

What Is Vibe Coding?

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is using an LLM to translate natural language prompts into code outputs with little to no human development work. It's like going to ChatGPT and asking for a website and having it create the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for you. In an ideal state, the code output is complete, functional, and allows marketers (or anyone) to deploy it to a production environment.

Vibe coding leans heavily on LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other tools to write the code from start to finish. Tools like Replit, Bolt, GitHub Copilot, and others are purpose-built for this type of work and can integrate directly into your development environment. Vibe coding allows you to create code outputs in minutes with no coding knowledge to accomplish your objectives.

In theory, that is. Vibe coding in reality is not free of problems. Using an LLM as your principal software engineer can create problems. There are cases where "vibe coders" have built and monetized apps where they've hard-coded API keys directly into their application, allowing bad actors to do malicious things like injecting code to corrupt user databases. Privacy and security concerns keep "real" developers awake at night, and there are robust processes on dev teams to ensure production code never creates security vulnerabilities.

Why Is Vibe Coding Relevant to Digital Marketing?

Robot selling goods at a beach

Like growth hacking before it, I predict that vibe coding will mature past the point of disdain to becoming an embedded part of mature digital marketing teams. In a field like digital marketing, outcomes are the focus not the tools themselves. How we accomplish our objectives is secondary (almost immaterial) to what those objectives achieve. Vibe coding is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

Digital marketers have about a billion things on their plate – some of which are complex, technical tasks, and others can be automated to support operational efficiency and scaling. Running scripts or using code is part of what we need to do as digital marketers. Like working with my friend Pat, we can accomplish a lot when we're able to use coding skills to achieve our objective.

A quick scan of use cases (which I've shared below) show that coding itself is highly useful in the digital marketing landscape. If a service has an API (and, spoiler, almost every self respecting service does have an API), you can create automation and workflows to speed up your work. Adding in a dash of thinking from an LLM via an API can improve processes tenfold.

Vibe coding represents another shift in the trend towards self-service in digital marketing; the ability of digital marketers to develop and run scripts without needing to tie up precious development resources.

One of the traditional challenges in getting dev help with scripting is that developers lack domain expertise. This context and nuance is important, sometimes becoming a significant hurdle in innovation cycles or a blocking progress outright. With digital marketers able to develop these things independently, they can leverage their domain expertise to develop highly personalized solutions.

What Skills Are Needed For Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding does require skill

You don't need special skills to start vibe coding. Open ChatGPT, make a request, and watch it work. The barrier to entry is low, but effective implementation requires:

• Prompt engineering
• Basic programming skills
• Knowledge of APIs
• Troubleshooting abilities
• Understanding of applicable use cases

Prompt engineering

The quality of your output depends on your input. Spend time upfront clarifying what you want to accomplish and how components fit together. For complex projects, create clear outlines and architecture briefs rather than winging it.

Basic programming skills

To use an LLM-generated Node.js script effectively, you'll need to understand how to execute it, what dependencies are required, and how services interact. While not mandatory, basic coding knowledge makes debugging much easier when things inevitably go wrong.

Knowledge of how APIs work

Many valuable marketing use cases involve connecting with external services. You'll often need to review API documentation and troubleshoot integration issues that LLMs can't fully address on their own.

Troubleshooting code

Despite the hype, you'll spend significant time fixing scripts, aligning with data schemas, and resolving execution errors. Patience and basic coding skills are essential for this inevitable part of the process.

Understanding of applicable use cases

Be strategic about what's worth automating. Ask: Is this a frequent problem? Is the development time justified? Can others use this solution? Resist the urge to "code all the things" and focus on high-value applications like automating content creation in Sanity.

Examples Of Vibe Coding in Digital Marketing

Let's dive into some real-world examples where I've leveraged LLMs to supercharge my digital marketing workflow - these aren't theoretical use cases, they're battle-tested solutions that have saved me countless hours.

Mockup for Explain Like I'm Sci Fi

Early prototype of Explain Like I'm Sci Fi

When conceptualizing my AI content generation pipeline (a beautiful mashup of Vue, Nuxt, Sanity, and various LLMs like Claude and Perplexity), I needed to visualize how the final product would feel before diving into the code. Instead of sketching wireframes, I had Claude generate example pages for my "Explain Like I'm Sci Fi" concept. This let me rapidly iterate through designs, test-driving the user experience in my head before writing a single line of production code. The process illuminated how the various page modules would interact - crucial intelligence for when I started building my multi-step content generation process.

AI-enabled Script for Airtable

AI meeting notetakers have become as common in virtual meetings as awkward "you're on mute" moments. At Knowbots, we'd routinely dump these transcripts into ChatGPT or Claude to extract actionable client tasks. But that middle step felt painfully manual.

So I had Claude write me a script that connects directly to our Airtable project management system. Now our workflow is beautifully streamlined: the script passes meeting transcripts through Claude's brain, which identifies and categorizes client tasks, then automatically populates them in Airtable. What used to be a tedious post-meeting ritual now happens with a single command. Pure. Digital. Magic.

Automating Blog Post to Sanity

I absolutely love Sanity, but let's be honest - its one Achilles' heel is the lack of a traditional blog editor where you can just copy-paste from Google Docs. After cutting my teeth on the Airtable integration, I had Claude help me craft a script that takes a markdown file and loads it directly into Sanity.

Inside Sanity's content editor for a Knowbots blog post

Consider the pain point: a complex blog post with dozens of different blocks could take up to an hour of mind-numbing copy-paste work. It's the digital equivalent of watching paint dry. My script? It runs in about 5 seconds flat. That's not just an efficiency gain - it's removing a task I actively dreaded and replacing it with a moment so brief I barely notice it happening. That's the true power of vibe coding: not just saving time, but eliminating friction.

Vibe Coding Use Cases in Digital Marketing

My examples are just a few ways you can apply this. Check out some more examples with ideas on how to implement them.

Vibe Coding Tools

What tools can you use for vibe coding? You don't necessarily need a purpose-built tool to accomplish your objectives – LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT use programming as a benchmark for rating the intelligence of the model. I personally find Claude to be one of my favourite tools to use a coding assistant. Here's a list of solutions on the market today.

Vibe Coding - Hype vs Reality

Vibe coding is in the midst of a hype cycle. Providing coding with LLMs or coding copilots with a sticky term has helped popularize (for better or worse) a tactic that is incredibly useful. Like growth hacking before it, vibe coding isn't my favourite term. It speaks to the tactic and creates a perception (for me at least), that the work done is highly transactional, low value, and lacks strategic focus.

I don't think this is the case. Vibe coding or coding with LLMs is a potent new digital marketing skill that can help teams accomplish goals faster, better, and with less reliance on external teams. I wonder if marketing organizations will end up hiring so-called "vibe coders" to fill the age-old gap that exists when it comes to accomplishing technical objectives.

I've never worked on or with a digital marketing team that couldn't use additional development resources. The work, however, is often ad-hoc and intermittent, meaning it's not usually worth the budget to hire a dedicated resource. At the same time, development work is often somewhat distracting for traditional development teams, who lack the context or business alignment to be dedicated to the outcomes.

My prediction is that vibe coding is a tactic looking for a strategic application. Growth marketing matured and evolved into product-led marketing, and I think the same trend will apply to vibe coding. Marketing teams, always in pursuit of revenue-aligned objectives, will turn to LLMs and those who can use them to develop novel solutions to help accelerate their team. Will there be a dedicated function on future digital marketing teams that combine digital marketing with coding copilots? I think so.