Scaffold a project with Vibe Code

Use the Vibe CLI to generate a full project from a natural-language description, review every change before it's applied, and run the result.

  • Natural-language scaffolding: describe what you want and the CLI creates the files.
  • Step-by-step confirmation: Vibe Code splits large tasks into steps and asks for approval.
  • Full preview: see every file change before it's written to disk.

By the end you'll have a working project scaffolded from a single prompt.

Time to complete: ~10 minutes

Prerequisites

Prerequisites

Tip

Scaffolding is a good use case for the plan or accept-edits agents. plan asks Vibe to outline what it will do before generating anything; accept-edits lets Vibe write files without prompting per step. The default agent asks for approval on every edit, which is safest for a first run.

Step 1: Create an empty directory and launch the CLI

Step 1: Create an empty directory and launch the CLI

Start in a fresh directory so the CLI generates the project from scratch.

mkdir my-project && cd my-project
vibe

The CLI starts with an empty context, ready to scaffold.

Note

If you run vibe in an existing project with a .vibe/ directory, the CLI asks whether you trust the folder before loading any local configuration. See Trusted folders.

Step 2: Describe your project

Step 2: Describe your project

Give the CLI a clear description. Be specific about language, framework, and key features. For example:

Create a Python Flask API with two endpoints: a /health endpoint that returns {"status": "ok"} and a /predict endpoint that accepts a JSON body with a "text" field and returns {"label": "positive", "score": 0.95}. Include a requirements.txt and a README.

Vibe Code breaks the request into steps and begins generating files. Before creating or editing any file, it shows a preview.

Vibe Code showing a preview of changes and asking for confirmation

Step 3: Review and approve changes

Step 3: Review and approve changes

For each step, the CLI displays the files it plans to create or modify, the content of each file, and a confirmation prompt. Press one of the approval keys:

  • Enter, 1, or Y to approve this specific edit.
  • 2 to approve all edits to this file in the current session.
  • 3 to approve all edits in this directory.
  • 4 to approve all edits in the working directory.
  • N to reject and send feedback.

After each approved step, the CLI shows the result.

Vibe Code displaying generated output and completed steps

Continue approving steps until the project is complete.

Verify

Verify

Check that the project was created:

ls -la

You should see the files Vibe Code generated (for example, app.py, requirements.txt, README.md).

Ask the CLI to start the server and test the endpoints for you:

Install the dependencies, start the server, and run a curl against /health and /predict to verify they work.

Or run it yourself:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Test the endpoints:

curl http://localhost:5000/health
curl -X POST http://localhost:5000/predict \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "Mistral is great"}'

Both endpoints should return valid JSON responses.

What's next

What's next