Building with Words: Vibe Coding in Healthcare

A nurse on a night shift scribbles an idea on a sticky note. A social worker dreams up a better intake form during lunch. A caregiver imagines a simpler way to track mood swings in a dementia patient. These small flashes of insight often go nowhere. Not because they are bad ideas, but because turning ideas into software has always been difficult. There are meetings, developers, tickets, budgets, delays, and approvals. In healthcare, those hurdles are even higher.

Now imagine a different path. The nurse describes her idea in a few sentences. A computer turns those words into a working app. She tries it. It’s rough. She types, “Make the buttons bigger. Use softer colors. Send reminders only on weekdays.” A few seconds later, she’s testing the new version.

That is what vibe coding makes possible.

It is not magic. It is not perfect. But it is real.

When Software Begins With a Sentence

In January 2023, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote something that caught the attention of developers and technologists everywhere: “The hottest new programming language is English.”

It looked like a joke. It was written like a joke. But it wasn’t one.

Karpathy, who trained at Stanford and helped lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, was an early member of OpenAI. He has spent his career at the edge of artificial intelligence and real-world engineering. He understands both the hype and the hard limits. When he talks about new ways of building software, people listen.

In talks and interviews, Karpathy explained that he wasn’t being ironic. He was describing a shift that had already begun. Large language models, such as those powering ChatGPT and Copilot, can now write functioning code from plain English descriptions. They can take feedback, adjust the design, fix bugs, and even write tests. All without a human developer typing a single line of code.

If that sounds like the future, that’s because it is. But in some corners of healthcare, it’s already happening.

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is a way of building software by describing it in natural language.

The name comes from how the process starts. A clinician or caregiver sits down with a specific feeling or idea in mind. Maybe they want an app that feels calming. Or a form that doesn’t feel like a burden. Or a dashboard that feels clear, not cold. They tell the model what they want: not just what the tool should do, but what it should feel like. The AI turns those sentences into real, working software.

They test it. They ask for changes. They refine. All in plain language.

This cycle — write, generate, test, revise — is what people now call vibe coding. The word “vibe” isn’t fluff. It points to the emotional tone that lives inside clinical work. In healthcare, how something feels often matters just as much as what it does.

Why This Matters in Healthcare

Healthcare software has always had a translation problem. The people who know what needs fixing often can’t build the solution. And the people who can build are rarely the ones living with the problem.

The result is slow progress, patchy tools, and burned-out users.

Vibe coding changes the pace and the power structure. It lets the person who notices the problem write the first version of the solution. That has a few clear benefits:

• Speed: A prototype can be ready in days instead of months
• Cost: Early drafts often cost less than $500 to test
• Relevance: The tool fits the real-world workflow because it was built from it
• Clarity: Emotional tone and intent are captured from the start, not layered on later
  

The ability to go from insight to working tool without hiring a developer is not a small change. It is a shift in who gets to shape care.

Learning from the Field: Two Key Perspectives

1. Building for Clinical Education

In a 2025 article in Medical Teacher, educators Minyang Chow and Olivia Ng shared how they used vibe coding to build two clinical training tools:

• A Differential Diagnosis Trainer that presented symptom cases and prompted learners to rank possible diagnoses
• A Blood Sugar Simulation Tool that allowed students to explore insulin effects over time
  

They did not hire a developer. They wrote detailed prompts, refined the outputs, and got working tools in less than a week. The tools worked. Students used them.

The takeaway was not just that they saved time and money. It was that they could focus on what mattered most: the learning experience. Instead of debugging dropdown menus, they thought about how to challenge students, how to model good reasoning, and how to surface useful feedback.

2. Designing for Feeling

Dr. Anita Puppe wrote a widely shared essay on LinkedIn describing her experience building with vibe coding. Her central point was this: software in healthcare should feel like part of care, not a barrier to it.

She used vibe coding to build small prototypes — reminders, onboarding screens, patient portals — with emotional tone baked into the prompt. Her tools avoided bright red warnings, used simple language, and gave patients space to feel heard.

The most important part of her approach was asking, “How does this make the patient feel?” and then making sure the answer shaped the code.

What the Process Looks Like

Let’s say a nurse wants a better way to remind post-operative patients to take their medication. The current system sends abrupt alerts. Patients ignore them or feel annoyed.

Here’s how she might use vibe coding to build something better:

1. Describe the idea:

"I want a mobile-friendly reminder app. It should send gentle medication reminders twice a day. The tone should be calm and friendly. Patients should be able to snooze it or confirm they’ve taken the dose. No red text. No exclamation points."

Generate the code:

The model returns a small web app with reminder logic, a few buttons, and customizable messages.

Try it out:

The nurse tests it and notices that the text is too small and the color scheme feels clinical.

Refine it:

Make the text larger. Use a soft blue background. Add an encouraging message when the patient marks a dose as taken.

Test again:

Now the tool feels closer to what she imagined.

Pilot it:

A small group of patients use it over a week. Their feedback helps decide whether it’s worth developing further.

From start to finish, this process might take three to five days. No team meetings. No vendor contracts. No engineering backlog. Just a person with a need, and the means to start solving it.

Real Examples from the Field

In March 2025, WRAL TechWire reported on several real-world vibe coding projects in healthcare:

• At CareYaya, a caregiver group built a dementia symptom tracker in under 10 days. They described how it should feel — warm, not sterile — and how it should work. It was tested with patients almost immediately.
• At Counterforce Health, a paralegal used vibe coding to build a tool that helps patients generate insurance denial appeals. The first working version reduced manual paperwork time by nearly half.

These stories show both the potential and the responsibility that come with vibe coding. Just because you can build something quickly doesn’t mean it’s ready for patients.

What It Helps Solve

Vibe coding addresses several long-standing problems in healthcare software development by shifting who can build and how quickly they can act.

Problem: Clinical ideas don’t get built.

Traditionally, a great idea from a nurse or physician might sit idle because turning it into software required a developer, a product manager, and months of planning. With vibe coding, the person who has the idea can begin testing it directly. That removes the need for translation and gets closer to the actual problem.

Problem: Software feels cold and impersonal.

Many clinical tools are designed with functionality in mind, but not with feeling. When the person building the tool also uses it, they can describe the emotional tone they want. Instead of default red alerts and robotic checkboxes, tools can feel kind, patient, and human — because those qualities are part of the original prompt.

Problem: Iteration is slow and expensive.

Even small changes to a clinical tool can require tickets, approval, and weeks of wait time. With vibe coding, changes are written in plain language and reflected in seconds or minutes. This speeds up testing, encourages feedback, and makes tools more responsive to user needs.

Problem: Small improvements are never prioritized.

In traditional development, only large, high-impact projects justify hiring a development team. But many of the most meaningful changes in healthcare — a clearer message, a friendlier tone, a smarter form layout — are small. Vibe coding makes it possible for individuals and small teams to build these improvements without needing to go through a formal roadmap.

Problem: Innovation depends on who has access.

Before, only people who could code — or who could hire someone to code — got to shape software. Vibe coding shifts that power. Now the person with the best insight can take the first step, even if they have never written a line of code before.

Risks and What to Watch For

Vibe coding is powerful, but it is not without risks. In healthcare, those risks matter.

Security and Privacy

‍Generated code can mishandle sensitive data. PHI might be logged by accident. Passwords might not be stored securely. These are not theoretical risks. They happen.

Clinical Safety

‍If the tool recommends or calculates anything related to treatment, it must be reviewed. AI-generated code can make mistakes, and those mistakes can harm people.

Regulatory Confusion

Some tools, even if simple, might qualify as medical devices. That means they require formal review and documentation.

Bias and Equity

The data behind large models can reflect real-world bias. A chatbot might respond differently to a white male patient than to a Black female patient, even if unintentional.

Maintenance and Technical Debt

Generated code might work well at first, but become hard to maintain. It’s important to plan for cleanup if the tool succeeds.

To manage these risks, some best practices help:

• Use fake data when testing
• Run basic security checks on any deployed code
• Keep human reviewers in the loop
• Store every prompt and code version for audit
• Involve patients and users from the start

The Future of This Way of Working

Vibe coding is just beginning, but it’s already starting to evolve:

• Builders will soon be able to describe a layout with a sketch, a voice memo for tone, and a short prompt for logic
• Hospitals will use edge devices that run these tools offline for privacy and speed
• Prompt libraries will grow, letting teams reuse and adapt proven starting points
• Models will help write compliance documentation along with the software
• Eventually, some apps will adjust themselves in real time based on patient or staff feedback
  

What matters most is not the tech. It’s the shift in who gets to build, and how quickly they can act.

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Final Thoughts

Most people working in healthcare have had the same experience: seeing something broken, knowing how it could be better, and feeling powerless to fix it.

Vibe coding gives them a starting point.

It doesn’t make engineers unnecessary. It doesn’t make regulation optional. But it does make the first version possible — without waiting.

And in a field where time, morale, and trust are often stretched thin, that can make all the difference.

If you’ve ever written an idea on a napkin, or drawn a better form on the back of a handout, you already know how to start. The only difference now is that you don’t have to hand it off and hope.