What if you could describe an application in plain English and see working code appear in seconds? This idea sits at the core of vibe coding, a term introduced by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025.
Vibe coding refers to AI-assisted programming where intent is expressed through natural language prompts instead of code. Teams use it to turn designs into working demos quickly. You can test user flows, validate layouts, and evaluate ideas without spending weeks on production code. The concept caught on fast and was later named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year, reinforcing its role in rapid prototyping.
This article puts that promise under the microscope. We ran a structured experiment across five web-based vibe coding tools: v0, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, and Figma Make. Each tool was asked to translate real Figma designs into working code. The sections that follow break down how each tool actually performed.
The experiment design
Most vibe coding tools generate interfaces that roughly match your prompt. They assemble familiar components from learned patterns. The result looks close, but rarely exact. That is usually enough for early exploration.
This experiment sets a higher bar. We tested how accurately each tool can reproduce a specific Figma design with defined functional requirements. The goal was not usability, but design and behavior fidelity. We evaluated five browser-based tools with different Figma-to-code approaches:
