Use Vibe Coding to build a personal website from scratch: writers can also launch their own digital facade on weekends
In the past two months, the most asked question by friends around me is probably: “How do you make vista.tw?”
Some of the people who asked were writers, some were coaches, and a few were colleagues doing brand consulting. The common point is that they all have a lot of content, cases, or readers who want to do business. But these things have been kept in a rented house from others for a long time - articles are on Medium, testimonies are on Facebook, course introductions are on the Notion public page, and old works have been lying in Google Drive for several years without being read.
I used to be the same.
In fact, the first version of vista.tw was moved from the blog I started around 2010. I changed platforms several times in the middle, and every move was like cleaning out an old warehouse. When I finally switched it to the current Astro architecture, I realized that what had blocked me for so many years was not technology, but mentality.
Why now?
The term Vibe Coding was first mentioned by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI in February 2025. At that time, he just casually described his working mode with AI programming: You are not really writing code, you are just feeling the vibe, watching it run, asking it to fix it, and continuing to read.
The reason why this sentence became popular is not because it is trendy, but because it expresses a change that many people feel but no one dares to say: writing programs is no longer centered on grammar for the first time.
In the past thirty years, I have seen too many writing friends who want to build their own websites, but they all end up stuck in the same place: first they have to spend six months learning HTML/CSS, then three months learning JavaScript, and then two months learning deployment. By the time he finished studying, he had already forgotten half of what he originally wanted to write, and he never started building a website.
The order of Vibe Coding is different. You first think about what you want, and then speak it to the AI in natural language; the AI generates the program code, and you see if the output is correct. If not, say it again with a more precise description.
Grammar is no longer the threshold, the threshold is whether you can explain the picture in your mind clearly. And to make this clear, writers do it every day.
What exactly does a personal website solve for writers?
I have to admit one thing first: if you only occasionally post articles and say hello to readers, social platforms are really enough, and a personal website is just one more burden for you.
But if you plan to do writing for a long time, you will hit a few walls sooner or later.
The first wall is search. When readers search your name on Google, what is the first thing that pops up? I want it to be a page I control, not some forum account I signed up in 2014 and forgot about.
The second wall is the economy. When you start taking cases, offering courses, or selling e-books, you need a place to put pricing, testimonials, and checkout links. You can’t always ask your customers to swipe through your Facebook feed to view old posts from three months ago.
The third wall is time. Social accounts are rented and websites are purchased. Some of the articles I wrote were ten years ago, and readers today can still read them on vista.tw - if those articles had been left on a forum or blogging platform I used back then, they would probably have disappeared by now.
If you too are starting to feel any of the walls above closing in, this article is for you.
Vibe Coding A real mentality change: you are not learning programming, you are learning description
This is the place where I’ve seen the most beginner levels.
As soon as many people hear about Vibe Coding, they rush to buy introductory programming courses, saying that they want to lay the foundation first. Then give up in the third week. The problem is not that they don’t work hard enough, but that they have taken the wrong learning path.
Traditional programming learning is like this: learn grammar, write small programs, write large programs, learn to debug, and finally make products. Vibe Coding is not this path at all. It is: clearly describe what you want, AI output, you judge what is wrong, use more precise language to correct it, and make a product.
Pay attention to the core verbs in Article 2 - describe, judge, and rewrite. These three things are very similar to writing.
What do writers do every day? Describe a scene, determine what is wrong with a piece of text, and change it to a more accurate version. You have been training this set of muscles for years or even decades. Vibe Coding just applies it to website development.
Let me give a simple mentality check to friends who are about to start: When the website produced by AI does not meet what you want, what is your first reaction?
If it’s “Did I not explain it clearly just now?”, congratulations, you have entered the working mode of Vibe Coding.
If it’s “AI is really stupid” or “Should I learn grammar again?”, then you haven’t stepped in yet.
My own commonly used tools
I have seen too many novices spend an entire weekend on tool selection, so I will directly give the conclusion in this part without explaining too much.
My current main editor is Claude Code, which is a pure terminal interface. You can talk to the AI and directly modify files, which is the most efficient. But for those who are new to it, I would recommend starting with Antigravity - it is the agent-first IDE launched by Google. It still looks like a traditional editor visually. You can see the files on the left and the agent workspace on the right. But you don’t need to learn “how to edit the code” first, just hand over the task to the agent directly. For people who have not written procedural programs, this “assign work” working model is actually easier than Cursor’s “I have to do it myself” model. When you start to feel unsatisfied, switch to Claude Code.
As a programming language framework, I choose Astro. I know the most popular one right now is Next.js, but for writers, Astro is the sweet spot. It treats Markdown as a first-class citizen - when you write an article, you write an .md file, just like you usually take notes; it defaults to output a static website, which is fast, has good SEO, and is free to deploy; its folder structure is simple, so novices will not get lost. vista.tw itself is written by Astro, and I am very used to it.
For website deployment, I use Cloudflare Pages, and it hasn’t cost me half a dime so far. Free, CDN global distribution, unlimited bandwidth - especially important for a site like mine with thousands of articles. If you don’t have a large amount of content and want to frequently experiment with new features, Vercel is also very good and provides a smooth developer experience. Some of my own sub-sites use Vercel.
One weekend, how to start from scratch
I ran the entire route in my mind several times and found the most comfortable rhythm to be like this.
On Saturday morning, you open Antigravity or Claude Code and tell it: Help me build a personal website using Astro. The first page is about. The content is about who I am, what I do, and two or three things I have done in the past. The style is concise, text first, and no fancy animations. AI will build the project structure and write the first page. Take a look at it and ask it to be changed if you don’t like it. This section lasts about ninety minutes, and you can try it back and forth three or four times.
Work on blogging on Saturday afternoon. If you have written articles in the past, pick five recent ones to move into. Ask AI to help you add a /blog route and let it read the markdown in the src/content/blog folder. Each article must have title, description, pubDate, tags, and the homepage displays the latest three articles. From this moment on, your website has a reason to keep updating.
Add a subscription form on Sunday morning. The most important asset of a writer is the reader list. All paid e-newsletter platforms will eventually take a commission, revise the edition, and add advertisements. The only thing that will not betray you is your own subscription form. String any embed of Substack, ConvertKit or Buttondown into it, as long as the email field is required.
The deployment went online on Sunday afternoon. Cloudflare Pages in one sentence. Buy a domain from Cloudflare Registrar or Namecheap for about twelve to fifteen dollars a year.
The last step - and what I think is the most important step - is to write a short article and post it to the community. The title is “I have my own website” and a link is attached. This step is key to turning your website from a technical piece into a personal brand asset. Without this step, no one will remember what you made over the weekend in two months.
Three pitfalls you may step on
The first pitfall is trying to do it perfectly at once. The most common tragedy I have seen is that after three months of planning, the last scene is not online. The first version of the website must be ugly, and that’s okay. It’s 10,000 times better to have the ugly version online than the perfect version not to be online.
The second pitfall is falling into the cycle of “learning another tool”. When you can already make a basic website with existing tools, please don’t jump when you see others recommending new tools. The cost of switching tools is always underestimated. Unless your existing tools are blocking you, stick with the same set of tools and spend your time on content.
The third pitfall is to treat the website as a work rather than a habit. People who are most likely to fail are those who treat website building as a one-time project. After it was built, it was no longer updated. Three months later, the website was basically useless. The minimum continuous rhythm I give myself is to update at least one thing every week - an article, a case, or even just a sentence of recent developments is good. With an updated website, search engines will continue to crawl it, and readers will remember to return.
Don’t want to touch it alone? Come to the workshop and make one
The weekend path above is a version that I assume you are willing to spend time grinding on your own, will patiently Google if you get stuck, and won’t panic if you make mistakes.
But I also know that many friends will get sweaty palms just thinking about opening the editor and seeing a blank project.
So I condensed this path into a three-hour workshop: Vibe Coding Practical Workshop｜Build your first sales page in 3 hours. With zero foundation and no engineering background required, I will accompany you on site to start from scratch and create a personal website, sales page or list collection page that can be launched online within three hours.
It’s the fifth class, and there are already more than sixty students—lawyers, doctors, university professors, coaches, and freelance workers. The average student rating is 4.9 stars. Each class is limited to twelve people, because I hope everyone can be taken care of, and when I get stuck, I can immediately walk over and look at your screen.
If you read the path above and feel, “Yes, this is what I want to do,” that path is there, just take it yourself. If you think “I might get stuck alone”, come to the workshop, I will accompany you through the first section.
You are not building a website, you are moving
In the past few years, I have increasingly felt that moving my personal website is the most appropriate metaphor.
In the past ten years, writers have been like renters living in luxury buildings. The building is beautiful and well-equipped, but you can’t renovate it or install mailboxes. If the landlord increases the rent or wants to move, you have to cooperate. Social platforms play this role for writers.
Building your own personal website means switching from renting a house to owning one. It may start humble, but it’s yours—you decide where the doorways are, what your living room looks like, and who you invite in. Vibe Coding reduced the cost of building this house to a weekend, leaving only one question: Are you willing to move?
This weekend is a good time, if you will. Open Antigravity or Claude Code and say the first thing to it. The rest, adjust as you go.
If you want to learn more systematically about how I integrate AI tools into my personal writing workflow, please subscribe to my email newsletter. Every week I share an AI writing or website building process that can be directly copied. Next week I will talk about the content migration record of vista.tw.
