Building a CMS without programming experience

Summary

I’ve been vibe coding for about 6-months now. When I say vibe coding, I don’t mean quick prompts on Lovable and forgetting about the code, though that’s a place to start. What I mean is putting in the hours and practice to get deep with Claude Code. Setting aside every Sunday to hustle on a project.Through this, I’ve been able to launch two apps on the App store, build several AI Assistants, and craft a couple websites. Before vibe coding, my ideas had been safely tucked away in a Figma board and cozy dinner conversations. Now, they are riffing, alive somewhere in the world.This got me thinking: I should share some of the journey on a blog. But here’s the question: how do you build a blog? In this essay, I wanted to share how I vibe-coded this very blog you are reading.BackgroundPreviously I had used Webflow and Wix to build websites. But I am not really a fan. It feels like death-by-a-thousand papercuts: the sites never look and feel the way I want them to, and they take longer than you’d expect to build.I wanted to make my own thing. There’s something very human, perhaps even self indulgent, about architecting my own vision and precise design versus using a template that’s been replicated and repurposed. Art Nouveau versus Bauhaus, I suppose.But there are some hard truths to face about vibe coding a website — especially one whose content I planned to update consistently.First, I wanted an easy to maintain website. No one wants a quick date change or sentence update to take 15 minutes — going to your GitHub project, finding the file where the item is located, changing it, committing the branch, pushing it to origin, deploying on Vercel — you get the point. This is where a CMS becomes extremely valuable.Second, if I wanted my content to be discoverable, it needed to be SEO friendly.And third, I had to make sure I got permissions right so no one could hack their way into my blog.While I had never vibe coded a CMS before, I felt vibe coding was there at this point and...