If you've tried vibe coding and ended up with a mess of an app (or a surprisingly large bill), you're not alone. There's a step that most vibe coding for beginners tutorials skip entirely, and it's the one that makes the biggest difference.
They forget to tell you to plan first.
Why Vibe Coding Experts Make It Look So Easy
When you watch someone who's been vibe coding for a while, they open up Lovable or Cursor or Claude Code and start typing like they already know exactly what they're doing. It looks effortless. What you don't see is the thinking that happened before that moment. The planning. The structuring. Whether that was scribbled on a piece of paper, worked out in their head, or done with an AI.
It's not that they're hiding it. It's that they've been doing this long enough that it happens automatically, without them even thinking about it.
As a beginner, you don't see that part. So you try to do what they do. You open the coding tool and dump your whole idea in. And then one of two things happens. Either it gets expensive very quickly (coding tools eat through tokens much faster than a regular chatbot), or the app just gets in a bit of a mess because there's too much information at once.
I did exactly this with one of my first attempts. Ugh. Tokens gone, app half-broken, and me staring at the screen wondering what went wrong.
How to Plan Before You Vibe Code (Without Knowing Anything Technical)
Here's the good news. You don't need to know the technical stages of building an app. You don't need to know what coding language it should be built in, or what comes first. All you need to know is what you want it to do.
Because you can use ChatGPT or Claude as your planning partner before you touch a single coding tool.
Think of it like walking into a design agency. After 25 years as a freelance graphic designer, I saw this all the time. You wouldn't walk straight past reception and go find the developer. There'd be someone in the middle who speaks both languages. Someone who understands what you want and can translate that into something the developer can actually work with. That's exactly what Claude or ChatGPT can do for you before you start building.
You describe your idea in plain English. The AI helps you break it down into features, stages, and a logical build order. Then you take that plan to your coding tool. Simple as that.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
In the video above, I walk through planning a simple Pomodoro timer app as an example. Nothing fancy, just enough to show the process.
I've been using this method for a few apps myself so far, including a to-do app with a desktop wallpaper, a transcriber, and a YouTube tool. Each time, the planning stage with a chatbot saved me from wasting tokens and going round in circles inside the coding tool.
I wish I'd had this approach from the start. It would have saved me a lot of frustration (and a fair few tokens).
Tips for Planning a More Complex App
If you're building something more complicated, create a project in Claude and get it to write your project instructions and plan for you. I prefer to attach my plan as a Google Doc. That way I can easily update it as each stage gets done, ticking things off and adding notes as I go.
This keeps everything organised and means you're not trying to hold the whole app in your head. Or worse, in a single enormous prompt.
FAQ: Vibe Coding Planning for Beginners
Do I need to know how to code to plan an app with AI?
No. You just need to describe what you want your app to do in plain English. The AI chatbot handles the technical breakdown for you, turning your idea into a step-by-step plan you can take to a vibe coding tool.
Why does vibe coding get expensive without planning?
Coding tools like Lovable and Cursor use tokens much faster than a regular chatbot. If you dump an unstructured idea in, the tool has to do more work, which burns through your allowance quickly. Planning in a chatbot first keeps those costs down.
What's the best AI to use for planning before vibe coding?
Both ChatGPT and Claude work well. For more complex apps, Claude's project feature is particularly handy because you can attach documents and keep your plan updated as you build.
I hope you'll give vibe coding a try, planning stage and all. It really does make the whole thing less stressful.
If you'd like more practical AI tips like this, written for people our age who are figuring this out as they go, you can sign up for my weekly AI emails. No jargon, no hype, just what's actually working for me right now.