Can vibe coding help cultural organisations build the tools they actually need?

For decades, building digital tools required one thing above all else: technical expertise. You either had a developer, or you made do with what off-the-shelf software could offer. That constraint shapes most digital decisions cultural organisations make. Vibe coding is changing that, but it comes with a learning curve, and it hasn’t fully reached the cultural sector yet. That’s exactly why it’s worth paying attention to now, and worth understanding properly before you dive in.

AI for writing versus AI for building

Most people working in the cultural sector have used AI in some form by now. To summarise a document, brainstorm ideas for a programme note, write a funding application. That’s AI as a writing assistant.

But AI can do something else entirely. It can write code. And that opens up a different possibility: not just helping you communicate faster, but helping you build things. Tools, applications, dashboards, forms, automations. Instead of writing code line by line, you describe what you want in plain language – the way you’d explain it to a colleague over coffee – and an AI generates working software from that description. You test it, refine it, give new instructions, and repeat. This is vibe coding: coding not based on extensive technical know-how but largely on… vibes!

The tools that make this possible; Lovable, Cursor, Replit, Claude Code and others, have matured quickly. Some started as productivity tools for engineers. Today they’re accessible to and used by people with no coding or technical background at all. However, that does not mean that anyone without any basic understanding or experience can create a complicated software that’s ready to use.

What vibe coding actually requires

Vibe coding isn’t simply a matter of opening a tool and describing your wildest idea. The organisations that get the most out of it are the ones where someone understands two things: how to give a good prompt, and what they’re actually asking the AI to do. You don’t need to be able to write or read code. But having a basic understanding of how digital tools work and for what purpose, makes the difference between building something useful and building something that looks right but breaks in practice.

This is important to understand from the start, not as a reason to hold back, but as a reason to prepare. The good news is that this knowledge doesn’t need to come from a technical specialist or a head of IT. It can sit with a producer, communications coordinator, project manager or technician. The question worth asking as an artistic director or manager is: who in my team could develop this fluency, and how do we support them to do it?

From a tool that almost fits to the one that actually does

Here’s the thing: the hardest part of building the right software isn’t the code. It’s understanding the problem. And the people who understand the problems within cultural organisations? That’s you! It’s the people who do the work.

A festival’s marketing manager knows exactly why the current ticketing export doesn’t work for their reporting. A theater’s production manager knows precisely which fields are missing from their project management tool. A museum’s fundraising coordinator knows the three manual steps they repeat every week that could easily be automated. That knowledge is the most valuable ingredient in building something useful. 

For artistic teams: making ideas visible faster

The cultural sector already has a long tradition of prototyping.You make something rough, test whether the idea holds up, and invest in the full version only once you know it’s worth it. Vibe coding fits naturally into this way of working, especially for artistic teams at the intersection of digital tools and creative processes.

From creating a simple website for a pop-up event, to building a working prototype for an immersive digital experience, vibe coding makes it possible to bring ideas into reality faster and with less dependency on outside expertise.  

Tech-dramaturg and researcher in the cultural sector Marijke Hessels, put it well in an earlier conversation with Tò Mò: “an underused application of AI in the arts is not on the stage and not in the office, but in the space in between, in the making process itself as a tool for developing and communicating ideas faster.” Vibe coding extends this premise into software. You do not need a complete idea to start, you just need enough to describe it. 

What this moment means for the cultural sector 

The cultural sector has always been resourceful, doing more with less, finding creative solutions within real constraints. Vibe coding is a new kind of resource: one that turns the deep knowledge your team already has about your organisation’s challenges into something you can act on directly, without depending on expert technical expertise you don’t have or budgets you can’t justify. 

You don’t need to overhaul everything today. But understanding what’s possible and starting to build that judgment about where and how to use it, is worth doing now. 

Curious about where vibe coding might fit in your organisation? Get in touch via the contact form.