Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordspeakleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about vibe coding.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Now, this is a new term. It's only recently been coined and it's a way of describing the kind of revolution that's happening in software development and especially software development for people that, if you aren't necessarily coders, um, and you know, whatever you do in seo, whatever you do online, you know software underpins it all. Software development underpins everything that we do and we use, and for most people it's been completely out of reach. But vibe coding is a way of potentially broadening that reach, or even for people who actually are developers. I mean, I myself have a software engineering degree, computer science, and I have done a lot of programming in time. I am, by my own admission, not the world's greatest coder, but I do understand coding principles. I do understand coding. I've done it professionally. It's not what I do most of my time nowadays. You know, we have a team here who are developers, who are much more talented developers than I am, but vibe coding is a way that bridges that gap partially between you know, hardcore development and being able to get things off the ground. So let's dive into it and talk about what it actually is.

Speaker 1: 2:42

So what is vibe coding? Well, in simple terms, vibe coding is an ai driven approach to writing code. So, instead of typing out every detail, developers can now describe what they want in natural language, almost like giving the AI a set of vibes and letting the machine generate the code. Now, this idea was popularized by a guy called Andrej Kapathy, who's a very well-known computer scientist, and he's a former Tesla AI director and was also listed as one of the co-founders of OpenAI. So he's a guy that really knows his stuff and he described it as not really coding in the traditional sense. So, rather than sort of wrestling with every syntax error or logic book, what you do is you provide your requirements and ai tools will do the heavy lifting. So like imagine telling your computer. Hey, make a sidebar with some extra padding and watch it happen, almost like magic, as it does it.

Speaker 1: 3:39

So why is vibe code getting so much attention all of a sudden? Well, first of all, accessibility and speed. Vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry, so even people with minimal or even no coding experience can now prototype an app by using these ai tools. For, you know, for many people it's like having an expert developer on call. You can just articulate your idea and within a few minutes you can see a working model, even if it's not perfect. You know, it's been noted that and I've seen examples of people out there you know, on LinkedIn, on Twitter who are total beginners when it comes to software, actually managing to start building something functional very quickly.

Speaker 1: 4:18

And it uses natural language as code. So prior to this, to be able to program, you had to sort of learn how to syntactically create computer programs. You didn't understand how the language worked, the syntax, the language and how to build it together. But with vibe coding, coding, you just need natural language english in most cases, but I presume it probably works in other languages if you're talking to your ai and your own natural language. If it isn't english, um, and you just you know, you speak your requirements or type your requirements and the ai will then translate this into code for you. It's a completely different way of doing things and, having been someone who's done this the traditional way, which was just the normal way before AI came along, it's really really, yeah, different and unusual way of doing things and it allows for rapid prototyping and iterating. So coding can be really time consuming Debugging, tweaking, refining it might take days or even weeks. With vibe coding, if the AI produces an error, you can just simply copy and paste the error message back into the system and it will often fix itself. And this kind of dynamic back and forth can really accelerate the development process and it can be really good for creating sort of quick, minimum MVPs, minimum viable products.

Speaker 1: 5:44

And I've used this myself more recently when trying to spec things for my developers. I can quite often create code and code examples really quickly to share with them. Now, okay, this is unusual for me that I am a developer but my skills are so rusty and the languages that you know we now use nowadays that all our stuff is built in I'm not very familiar with because my experience is really quite old, but using AI. I can really quickly start and say I might go to ChangeGPT for an example and I might say I want to create this tool in JavaScript that will say, for example, connect to Google Search Console, will download some data, will create an interface that's clickable in a certain way and essentially, if you see the search analytics tool that we have now on QSPPU the very first prototype for that I created using this kind of vibe coding technique this was back in the last year, so it wasn't vibe coding as a term. It had only been coined since February 2025. So I didn't know it was vibe coding then. But that was just what I was doing. I was using it and I was going back and forth with the AI to create a basic prototype that I could show developers and say right, this is how I want it to work, this is how I want it to do certain features, this is how I want it to sort of pull the data from on the fly and that kind of thing. And so it proved that it was a thing that was possible to do and it gave a basic interface.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So what kind of tools are people using to do this? So some of the most common ones are Cursor, which is an integrated development environment which has a composer section which allows you to type in your requirements and then it will start creating code for you around it. And these tools are iterating themselves so fast the things they can do now, compared to just a couple months ago, they're getting more and more advanced and more and more capable of creating polished code and getting it to a deployable state. Another one is replit. Again, this is one which comes as own online integrated development environment and again the same process. You know you can start talking to it, um, typing to it saying what your requirements are. It'll start building code for you on the phone. You can see it build the code and you can test the code in it and it can help deploy it. And there's others, like bolt and other ball, which ones I'm not, I haven't used, but they're again the same kind of same kind of process. And also you can just talk to chat gpt. If you're, I say, probably a more confident developer and can set up your environments and that kind of thing, then using chat gpt or claude claude's very good as well at this um for helping you develop and fix problems. That yeah, if you're a more experienced developer, you can find that using AI to help you talk through problems, solve problems and work out ways of achieving things that it just might have taken you a hell of a lot of research and trial and error, otherwise you can. You can achieve so much more quickly with these AI tools.

Speaker 1: 8:58

So here's me banging on about vibe coding. What does it have to do with SEOs? Well, simply put, everyone who has anything to do with SEO has to deal with lots of data, and there's plenty of tools out there to help you do it. We've got keywords people use. We've got things we've built there that can help people, but there's always going to be things that've built there that can help people, but there's always going to be things that you'll find that are specific to you, and you may find that you have small tools you want to develop yourself. This is like I'm talking to you now. For those of you who this is where this can actually help you create what they call software for one.

Speaker 1: 9:36

So if you're trying, you have a problem and you want to solve it, and you want to solve it at scale and you want some software to do it for you, you could use vibe coding to actually create something that works for you. It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to be something that you know. You don't have to consider the things that we do when, say, for example, at QWIS, people use We've got, you know, thousands of users. We have to be able to make sure it's scalable to that number of people. We have to make sure that it's fault tolerant, so that you know it's reliable All those kind of things that you do when you've got customers at scale. But if you're just trying to solve a problem just for yourself, you don't need it to be perfect, you don't need it to be polished, you just need it to work and for you to be able to use it. And you can use vibe coding to create those pieces of software and those tools just for you.

Speaker 1: 10:29

I think we're going to see this happen more and more, especially as these tools like replit and Cursor are getting much better at also making them deployable. So that's one way it can help anyone who's an SEO, anyone who's a developer and working in SEO then this kind of vibe coding can really help you. If, for example, you have a team and you want to be able to create sort of prototypes for them to work off. That's really valuable. That's how I use it, and it helps speed up the process of getting software from an idea of your head into something that's deployable uh, for people to use. Because if you're trying to get an idea across to a developer, if you've got something that you demonstrate the actual functionality, even if it's raw and unpolished, then that's an incredible accelerator for them when it comes to understanding what it is you're actually trying to achieve. And if you're actually a developer, then you can actually use AI generated code in a way that can really accelerate your output as well, because you can let the AI do a lot of the heavy lifting and you also have the advantage of understanding the code underneath so that if there are issues, if there are problems, if there are bugs, aid AI can help you find them, but also you can help the AI find it, because sometimes the AI can get lost in loops.

Speaker 1: 11:51

This is where I suppose we can come to. What are the downsides of this? And I think yes, the big downside is the balance of speed with quality. You can create stuff really fast with vibe coding. That can be at the expense of quality. The tools themselves that do this are improving all the time. So this is one I think will become less of an issue over time, but right now, yeah, seen I see people creating stuff and get really excited, but as soon as they get to a certain point with it, the ais can't handle the complexity of a large system and balancing all the different issues, because with software, it's quite easy to add one piece, change one piece of code and it'll break something else elsewhere that you don't realize.

Speaker 1: 12:35

And this is where, past a certain point, where this vibe coding, I think, has its stumbling block at the moment. We found I found that, certainly when I've been using it to try and create stuff, and that I can get so far along with something and get something really advanced, and then I make one small change to it and it can break something catastrophically and it can be sometimes hard for the AI to recover that. It can be hard for you to recover it, so it can. There are still limitations at this point, but it is definitely getting better all the time. So come back in a year time, two years time, three years time. Who knows how far down the line how this will have advanced, but I think for now you still need, definitely, that human in the loop to have the over, at least have the overview of what an entire system is meant to do uh, how to make you know, how to watch and maintain quality and testing, uh, over the life cycle of developing something. Yet that's still not there. But fiber coding is definitely.

Speaker 1: 13:38

If you said to me five years ago that people could do this, I just wouldn't have believed you. So the pace it's coming on is insane and, yeah, I would encourage you to try it out, even if it's just for experimental purposes. Try something out. It's amazing to see how you can build things, especially if you have never developed anything before in your life. It's really, really interesting. And you know, as I say, software for one. If you've got a problem you're trying to solve and you need some software to do it, you can now create that basic software without any development knowledge. So it's really really interesting. So that's it for today.

Speaker 1: 14:13

I know it wasn't massively SEOo focused, but I think, as seos, you need to be aware of how these things are evolving, because it probably will come into your um sphere sometime very soon. Um, so, yeah, get ahead of it, try it out. So, yeah, that's it for now. So until next time. Remember, keep optimizing, stay curious. Remember, seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 14:39

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on linkedin and blue sky. Just search for ed dawson.

Speaker 1: 14:54

Both you can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeoplesusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize continually refine your content, targeted, personalized advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.