Designing the Product Experience for a 100k+ User Vibe-coding Platform

The gap was in the language. Labels, empty states and error messages described what the system was doing rather than what the person was trying to achieve. To someone who had never opened a terminal, that reads as a warning instead of an instruction.

So the work was as much editorial as visual. We went screen by screen and rewrote what the product said, then rebuilt the moments where people stalled: the first run, the empty project, the point where a build fails. Each one had to answer what happens next and why it matters.

Nothing could feel intimidating. The denser technical detail stayed available for developers who wanted it, but it moved off the default path, so the non-technical majority could get from an idea to a working product without being asked to understand the machinery underneath.