AARP Hearing Center
How to Make Your Own App or Website Using AI
AARP’s AgeTech Venture Studio VP explains how vibe coding lets anyone build an app without having to write code
7-minute read
AARP tech expert Rick Robinson explains how AI can help everyday users build custom websites and web-based apps in minutes.
AARP (Getty Images,3)
Key takeaways
- AI can build apps and websites for you. Describe what you want in plain English, and AI generates the code behind the scenes.
- Anyone can try vibe coding. Tools like Lovable, Bolt and Replit let beginners create custom projects with little to no technical knowledge.
- The real power is personalization. Instead of settling for generic software, you can create tools tailored to your hobbies, family and everyday needs.
If things broke when I was a kid, we fixed them, or at least jury-rigged a solution. And if we couldn’t do it, there was always a go-to handyman — my dad, or my friend Timmy’s dad — who could whip up a fix for the banana seat on a Schwinn Sting-Ray as easily as making an omelet.
But today, many of the things we use are digital. When they break, fixing them isn’t as simple as grabbing a wrench or finding a handy neighbor. Throughout the so-called Web 2.0 period (roughly 2004–2012), when building digital products was supposed to be democratized, the truth was that unless you were a software engineer or a casual hacker like me, it was challenging to make anything real. The bytes usually bit back.
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Webpage-building tools like Squarespace, Weebly and Wix let us wield some power over the pixels, but they still required knowledge and effort to build sites that looked just right, whether they were for work portfolios or family reunions. And even then, there were limits to what you could publish.
Then came a vibe shift.
In 2024, powered by a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models, several start-ups arose promising that anyone could build software without writing a line of code. Companies such as Replit, Bolt, v0 and Lovable offered this service, with subscription plans that ranged from limited free options to around $20 a month for more features. Google and Microsoft also expanded their AI footprints, launching Google AI Studio and a new version of Copilot. And in February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI cofounder and former head of AI at Tesla, posted on X that he was no longer looking at the code he produced but instead was simply riding on vibes.
“There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” he wrote in a post.
“Vibe coding” had entered the lexicon. The revolution in customized, homemade software had begun. And people were noticing: The Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its 2025 Word of the Year.
Over the next year, the “coding” part of the definition started to fall away, and even seasoned software developers began to simply tell the tools what to create. Most website applications require thousands of lines of code to make them work; vibe coding tools write the code for you based on what is described in plain English.
That’s right — you can now push a button, speak your web-based application into being, and see and share it live on the internet minutes later.
In corporate America, executives who had never used anything beyond PowerPoint were suddenly making website prototypes and passing them on to their teams. People who enjoyed playing cards as a pastime could now vibe their way into creating virtual card games of their own design.
As a longtime techie and the vice president of AARP’s AgeTech Venture Studio, where we create new products, often built with AI, I’ve vibe coded a range of applications: tools to evaluate pitches that AARP gets from companies wanting to work with us, AI personas trained on AARP information and research that we can have a conversation with, and fun things like the app that AARP used in our booth at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which transformed visitors into a version of themselves wearing a futuristic “exoskeleton” suit.
As these tools continue to evolve, the impact on the market could be swift and broad: Why pay for an exercise-tracking application that doesn’t fill your exact needs when you can conjure up something yourself? Paying for expensive family care coordination products to make sure a loved one takes their medicine? Won’t be long before you can tell the computer you want something better, something customized to your requirements, and watch as it appears, hosting and all.
This might sound like hype from Techlandia, but not all hype is unfounded. I should know, having spent 30-plus years in and around software but not quite becoming an engineer: In the past few years, I’ve vibe coded nearly 200 apps. These include personas that you can talk to about new product ideas, a web application that lets you practice job interviews with an AI version of a hiring manager and even a tool that builds an application in seconds based solely on your voice commands.
That likely qualifies me to say that the best way to see through the hype is to start by telling your computer what you need and watching what it can do.
How to vibe code your own app
When you’re ready, pull up a web browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge.
Choose which vibe coding platform you’d like to use. Here is a list with cost breakdowns. Most will let you try creating for free before requiring a monthly subscription:
Lovable (lovable.dev) is perhaps the most approachable platform for non-technical builders. It’s so simple that I almost expect to hear “You’ve got mail” when I open the application, hearkening back to how AOL made getting online easy. It’s great for building a small-business website in a jiff or making your own to-do app with, say, that one feature unique to your needs. It’s free to get started, allowing you to build up to five applications, and $25 a month for more features.
Bolt (bolt.new) gets you up and running super fast and takes care of connecting other tools you might need, like a database, to make your web application work. For example, you could create a virtual community tool shed, where neighbors can coordinate the sharing and borrowing of gardening tools. You can start for free and add more features for $25 a month.
Replit (replit.com) is also pretty easy, allowing you to go from idea to complete website or web application quickly. It costs nothing to get started and $20 a month for more usage.
v0 by Vercel (v0.app) is a little more technical, but offers tasteful design as well as publishing and hosting features via its sister product, Vercel. Use v0 to create a memory lane website that organizes and displays family photos by year or event. It’s free to start building, then $30 a month to access more features and more powerful AI models for more sophisticated results.
Google AI Studio (aistudio.google.com) makes quick work of your projects and hosts everything, and its less powerful models are free. You can ask it to make a local events finder that builds a custom display of events at community centers or libraries in your ZIP code. It’s also free to start, then $19.99 a month to access premium models.
Once you’ve picked a platform, start with something low-stakes, and don’t include medical records or account numbers in your first build; think of it as a sketch. Think about something you might google, and instead turn the answer into an always-available answer machine.
For example, instead of searching “What is the weather going to be today?,” go ahead and tell one of the above tools, “Make me an app that shows the daily weather for my hometown,” and watch what happens. I can almost promise that you’ll quickly be on to your next request, perhaps further customizing your personal weather center. Like the finished product? Share it with friends.
Maybe you’re helping your grandson with a school report on dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period. Rather than reading along with him, vibe code an interactive website to help him understand the period and maybe impress his teacher (keeping in mind school rules around AI, of course). A first pass at it might look like this.
Creating things that improve our lives, or simply make them more fun, without having to wrangle code and by just typing or speaking what we want into a computer, may be the most modern thing the general public can do.
In some ways, we’re all becoming the handyman, just for a different kind of outcome. We can’t tell a computer to fix our bike with code. But the day is coming when kids won’t ask their friend’s dad to fix their bike. They’ll ask an AI that walks and talks — and don’t bet against those vibes.
But we’ll save that for another day.
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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