How I Became A Vibe Coder

Yesterday, we launched the full program for the World Beautiful Business Forum. Five mainstage acts, 10 thematic tracks, plenty of community activities. 89 sessions in total across multiple venues in Athens, May 7–10, 2026.

And while curating the contributors, designing the sessions, and orchestrating the overall journey of this 10th anniversary festival by the House of Beautiful Business has been a lot of human labor, turning it into the most sophisticated program website we’ve ever had took me less than an hour.

It was my first real vibe coding experience. I want to share a bit about the process — because I believe it can be genuinely useful for some of you working on similar things. And because there are a few bigger thoughts in here that have been sitting with me all week.

How it started

Over the past months, my dear HoBB co-founder and friend Tim Leberecht had gone to considerable lengths to build the program of our festival and put it all into a single, meticulous 25-page Google Word document (with really small font size!). Last Friday evening, he sent around the latest document, asking our design team to begin work on a designed version for the program announcement.

Later that night, Tim and I spoke about one administrative/communicative challenge we would face once we published the program: some of the sessions in Athens will have limited seats and require pre-registration – how do we enable attendees to signal their interest for specific sessions? We floated setting up and sending out a detailed Typeform and left it there.

On Saturday morning, while my family was still sleeping, I opened Claude — I have the Pro subscription at €17 per month — and out of curiosity typed:

Can you turn a Word doc with a detailed conference program into a digital platform where attendees can see the program and filter it by multiple criteria — chronological, venue, theme track? I’d also then need a simple way for attendees to register their interest for a few sessions with limited capacity. Can you help?

Claude laid out a plan and suggested building a “React Web App” — a single self-contained HTML file requiring no backend. What followed was a quick detour for me as a non-techie to understand what that meant; then a few minutes in which Claude guided me to set up a free Netlify account for publishing; and here I was, ready to go.

An idea becomes a project

The first stage of “our project,” as Claude called it, was turning all information from the word document into a massive structured spreadsheet: all sessions, contributors, venues, and tracks properly organized. I said “go” and brewed another coffee. When I came back, the XLS file was waiting. I opened it, realized I had absolutely no desire to review it line by line, trusted the outcome — which turned out to be 100% accurate — and told Claude to continue.

Without any additional prompt, Claude created the first version of the HTML file in about two minutes. I opened it and saw a working website: multiple filter options, color-coded theme tracks, session detail cards. Typeform integration pre-wired, pending the URLs.

Pushing beyond the first idea

Maybe 15 minutes in, I started to push. Claude and I discussed the registration flow and ended up agreeing to skip Typeform entirely and build a native “I’m interested” button into the site itself, collecting responses in a Google Sheet. Claude gave me detailed instructions to set this up, including a few lines of code to paste into the Sheet. None of it was complicated.

This is where something shifted emotionally. The collaboration didn’t feel like me using a tool anymore. Claude’s continuously running commentary and eagerness (While you decide — I’ll go ahead and build it with the placeholder now so you can see and feel the full experience immediately) gave me the impression of real engagement and collaboration.

I’ve been sitting with this feeling since. And I’m not alone in it. In a survey of 900 professionals we conducted for our recently published Agentic Organizations report with Hotwire and ROI·DNA, more than a third of respondents said AI already feels like more than a tool to them — either a colleague or a decision-maker. I hit that threshold somewhere around minute 20 of my Saturday morning coffee session.

The first miss

After half an hour I had a functioning website with a working registration system. The next few minutes I spent playing. Can you add a search function? (Worked perfectly from the start, and reminded me how broken search felt in the mid-2000s when I started working as a conference manager.) Can you add a star to each session so I can favorite and filter for the sessions I’m interested in? (Worked immediately, too, but needed a few visual iterations.) Change this background color… Make this font white… One big iterative flow. And then it suddenly hit me.

Not a single speaker name was included in the session cards.

Ugh. I just realized that the website you created doesn’t include the speaker names. It’s important that they’re featured too. Can you work that in?

Claude fixed it cleanly in one iteration (I don’t know why it hadn’t pulled that information initially from the spreadsheet it had built). Interestingly, this first miss and fix actually increased my confidence — I realized I could direct the system even more actively than I had been.

53 minutes in, I drag-and-dropped the latest iteration of the index.html file to my Netlify account and the website was live. I messaged Tim:

Have a look — https://luminous-scone-470896.netlify.app/. Took me less than 60 min to go from the Word doc to a live website with the program and a registration function for what we discussed yesterday. Should theoretically work on desktop and mobile (haven’t checked yet).

Refinements and expansions

On Monday, our designers joined. We adjusted fonts, color schemes, swapped the session-favorite star for a lemon (the symbol of the World Beautiful Business Forum), added a lemon favicon, all by conversing with Claude. Each prompt produced a new index.html that I dragged onto Netlify. Within seconds, each update was live.

Throughout the week, we kept iterating and expanding the site. One of the more complicated tasks was adding contributor bios. Our main event website features all speakers with a one-liner and biographical attributes — but because we’d built it image-heavy for aesthetic reasons, Claude couldn’t extract the information directly. I had to convert the site to PDF, have Claude read it into a spreadsheet, then manually fix quite a bit of misplaced data. A small reminder that beautiful design and machine readability don’t always go hand in hand. (We wrote about exactly this tension in the Agentic Organizations report: brands now operate in a much more logic-driven environment and increasingly need their digital presence to speak to machines as much as to people.)

As we got more comfortable with the site, we realized it could also work harder as a marketing asset for people who had not yet bought a ticket for our festival. Our natural tendency at the House of Beautiful Business is to be a bit more on the poetic side with session titles and prioritize keeping things slightly more abstract and mysterious ahead of the event. But when I showed the program site to a friend, he said: “It’s great to see the program like this, but I wish I understood better what the sessions are actually about.” I brought this back to Claude along with some raw internal notes we had captured in our ideation process for multiple sessions. Claude used it to invent short descriptions and “This is for you if…” benefit statements for all 89 sessions. Probably 82 were perfect.

At some point I then asked how to set a custom URL. Another step-by-step guide followed, and a few minutes later, program.worldbeautifulbusinessforum.com was live.

What I learned

As not overly tech-savvy people, we didn’t spend more than two person-days collectively to go from a Word document to the best-functioning program website we’ve ever had. Back in 2020, we paid an agency a low five-digit sum to design and build us a conference program platform. This one, at current subscription rates, will have cost us less than €100 when the event concludes.

My first experience as a vibe coder left me with a few things I keep returning to.

Always structure your content.

Most of my work comes down to developing ideas and writing them down in some form. Until this project, I didn’t fully understand though how important it is to always properly structure that content, no matter the form. You don’t need to create spreadsheets if this is not your medium; but you do need to always structure your content output in a way that a machine can turn it easily into a table. The reason we were able to move so fast was that Tim had been meticulous and consistent in writing down the program — always the same sequence of categories, always similar lengths of text, always the same formatting. That discipline, which felt at times almost obsessive, turned out to be the entire foundation.

Design for humans and machines.

The moment content structure got less clear — like with our image-heavy contributor page — effort and errors multiplied. Our decision to build our main event website around a specific visual idea beyond the capacities of our website content management system made it more beautiful but far less accessible to AI agents. Commercially, this probably was the wrong decision, because AI agents could not pick up on the details of the event, which means we have probably reached less people so far with our product than we could have. We even wrote about this in the aforementioned Agentic Organizations report. We need to eat our own dogfood.

Rhythm and flow are real.

One of the things I found most beautiful in my vibe coding work is the natural rhythm you develop in your interactions with the AI agent. The asking-answer-output sequence can feel fast and electric or slow and exploratory. Sometimes an iteration takes two minutes — a quick break from other work. At others, you work yourself into a full state of flow. Much like with a human collaborator, you build a rhythm.

Start fresh regularly.

As soon as conversations grow long, Claude reaches the limits of what my subscription allows. The token usage of my interaction was not really transparent, and hitting the pause moment was quite frustrating at the beginning. But I soon discovered a workaround: regularly start new chats, uploading the latest HTML file with a note for Claude to read it and pick up where we left off. It significantly extends the runway.

Context is quality.

The more I work with AI, the more I understand it’s a quality-in-quality-out game. Feed it original thinking — in this case, the actual notes and ideas about the sessions that are the result of real creative reflection — and you get great output back. Without it, it’s like ideating with a very boring person.

Just try it.

None of this was planned. None of it would have emerged from a briefing session. It all came from playing with the technology and learning by doing. The learning curve is steep and exciting.

What’s next — and why you should come to Athens

I’m eager to soon put my new vibe coding enthusiasm to the test again. The project already in motion is daunting in the best way.

One of the largest tracks at the World Beautiful Business Forum will be the AI Democracy Marathon (including indeed the opportunity for guided group walking of 42.2km over the course of the festival). It will be an exploration of how AI can and will transform democracy, and each night, the sessions of the day will culminate in the AIssembly: a generative AI experiment where a council of AI agents takes on the perspectives of thinkers and doers like Plato, Hannah Arendt, Ada Lovelace, Peter Thiel, Bob Marley, and more to debate the day’s insights while humans sleep — and surprise us with their conclusions in the morning. Our goal is a both entertaining and insightful experience with highly individualized voices interacting with each other - fully automated, with multimedia output, creating real thought leadership. Let’s see how far vibe coding can get us. 

We’d love for you to experience this in person – not least because the World Beautiful Business Forum is the House of Beautiful Business’s 10th anniversary. The program reflects a decade of work, community, and thinking distilled into four days. Twelve program tracks, each a sustained exploration of what a life-centered economy might look like in practice.

Sessions spread across multiple venues, all culturally significant, all within 15 minutes’ walk of each other — including the Olympia City Theatre Maria Callas — a neoclassical jewel in the heart of Athens — the Demos Center in Plaka, the old Athens Stock Exchange, and an intimate bookstore tucked inside one of Athens’s storied interior arcades, reserved for 1:1 encounters.

On the closing day, the festival ends with a long, unhurried picnic with football (the beautiful game!), good company, and whatever remains to be said. Integration, in the truest sense of the word. And for those not quite ready to return to regular life, the week after the Forum, there is the Aegean Passage — a sailing trip to digest it all.

I hope all of this has given you reason enough to take a look at program.worldbeautifulbusinessforum.com, where the latest version of the festival program is always waiting for you. The remaining tickets are available at worldbeautifulbusinessforum.com.