Vibe Coding for Event Pros: What You Can Build Today and What You Can't

I wanted a quick way to prototype concepts and ideas I hear from the event planners I speak to, so two months ago, I started to explore “vibe coding”.

I’m not a coder. I have to leave the real coding to my co-founder, who has done that for 20 years. But I have run events for 20 years, and I needed a fast way to explore new event-solution concepts without distracting him from building our actual product.

Here’s what caught me off guard.

Within those two months, I rebuilt our website, a planner solution called DateClash (dateclash.com). It’s a free tool where you cross-reference public holidays, school holidays, industry events, and more to find the best dates for your event. After some feedback, I expanded it to let you upload your own data, scrape the internet, and include any other data points relevant to you, so you have even more to cross-reference when picking dates.

I did not stop there. I recreated several core functions from our own software to explore new concepts around them. For example, I built a shareable link you can send to your event speakers to collect presentation titles and descriptions. The speaker sees a simple window, throws in their text, and the LLM converts it to the format I need and integrates it directly with the solution. No login. No back-and-forth emails.

The tools for you to build something like this yourself are all there. I’ll walk you through how to get started. The learning curve is surprisingly low.

But I also learned something. For event teams inside organizations running complex, multi-stakeholder events, the real AI opportunity is different. Personal tools solve personal friction. But for event teams inside organizations, the challenge and opportunity are different.

If you keep reading, you’ll learn how to:

• For Individuals: Build your own first internal tool to save you time when running your next event
• For Organizations: See where the ceiling is, and why the real AI opportunity for event teams looks very different

The 2-Minute Version: What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding: “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.” — Andrej Karpathy (former head of AI at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI)

That’s it. You describe what you want in plain language. The AI writes the code. You run it. If something breaks, you paste the error back in and it fixes itself. At this level, you don’t need to understand the code. You just need to know what you want the tool to do.

Two months in, I’ve built more functional prototypes than I would have thought possible. But funnily, my feeling still flips between “this is incredible” and “I can’t believe it gets stuck on this.” That’s the reality. It is powerful but it is also imperfect, and somewhat telling, my co-founder doesn’t agree with any of its outputs. And he is right, the quality of the code is not great, so we don’t use it to build our software. But for a small in-house tool to help you with specific tasks? I think it has a lot of potential and it’s absolutely worth a try.

What You Need to Get Started

You don’t need much. Here’s what I recommend:

An AI coding tool. Start by setting up a Claude Code subscription and running it on Visual Studio Code on your computer. There are very good tutorials for this, and if you get stuck at any step, just take a screenshot of what you see and ask Gemini or ChatGPT to help you solve it. Or just PM me, and I’m happy to walk you through it. If you want to try this without a subscription, I (or anyone with an Anthropic subscription) can give you a one-week free promo code to try it out without any commitment. That’s it!

A clear problem to solve. When I heard an event planner express the trouble she got into simply by planning a corporate event during an important Jewish holiday, I thought, this is a perfect challenge to try to vibe-code a solution for. That’s how DateClash was born. It’s small… well, it started small. Now I’m getting more requests for features, and we want to build it from scratch in our main software.

I think this is the most important part. Don’t start with “I want an all-in-one app.” Rather, “I want a simple tool for just this problem.” Then brainstorm with your AI on what it could look like for a bit, and then let it loose.

Patience for iteration. You will not get a perfect result on the first try. You describe what you want, the AI builds something, you say “change this”, “move that”, “add this,” and it iterates. Think of it as directing someone who codes incredibly fast but sometimes misunderstands your intent. You need to guide it.

A willingness to describe things in detail. The AI doesn’t know your event workflow. You have to explain it. “I want to be able to send my speakers a link that does not ask for a login; they just drop their text in a field, and I want an LLM to convert that into the title, synopsis, summary, and description fields in my form. I want to be able to review and accept or ask for more info. If I accept, the text gets copied into my speaker copy notes.” Even better, throw in a screenshot or two showing how you want it to look.

That’s it. That’s the flow. As you get more into it, you’ll also notice that YouTube is full of well-described tutorials for all of this.

Where the Ceiling Is

If you want a to-do tracker, schedule builder, website scraper, or format converter, you can build all of these yourself rather easily.

What you probably won’t manage to build is a replacement for larger solutions like Slack, a complete vendor management solution, or a complete ticketing platform. Here, you’re safest using what’s already out there. Unless you only need a tiny part of it, then give it a try for yourself.

But what you might not realize is how much security and stability infrastructure has gone into these tools to make them work the way you expect.

Even for a small tool, it is tempting to skip tests and security precautions. I would strongly advise you not to. Apparently, 36% of vibe coders skip any form of testing or quality assurance entirely. And 11% eventually hit what researchers called “code breakdown or abandonment,” where the project reaches a state they can’t recover from.

But even here, all you have to do is tell the LLM to implement testing and security standards for each step of the way. You don’t actually have to do anything yourself.

The last warning is also the fact that this is insanely addictive. When I say I spent 2 months exploring, I mean I easily spent 10+ hours every day for these past months.

So here’s the thing: vibe coding is incredible for personal tools, prototypes, and exploring ideas. It saves time and money. It lets you test concepts before committing resources. I believe every event professional should learn the basics.

But if you’re running a team, managing complex multi-stakeholder events, or operating within an organization with security requirements and existing infrastructure, vibe-coded tools won’t get you there. The reason goes deeper than code quality, and the real opportunity here is different.

The Real Opportunity for Event Teams

Think about what makes a senior event planner so effective. They have gone through many cycles. Planning an event, executing it, seeing what went wrong, adjusting the plan, executing again. Repeat this across dozens of events over 10 or 15 years, and you build an intuition that no checklist can capture.

That intuition lives in one person’s head. 42% of institutional knowledge in organizations exists only with individual employees. In the event industry, where hourly staff turnover runs at 63% per year, that knowledge walks out the door constantly.

Competence-Building Machine

With the right infrastructure, LLMs can give teams the opportunity to build what we can call a competence-building machine. A system that captures what happens during every event cycle and feeds it forward into the next one.

This is the gap that personal tools cannot fill. Your vibe-coded schedule builder helps you plan faster. But the code base is too unstable to rely on it to work well enough to be the central brain for all your operations for years.

What organizations need is a system where planning and execution happen in the same place, so they can learn from each other. Your planning influences the execution. The execution feeds back into the planning. Each cycle, for each event, for each team member, the system gets smarter.

This is what we are building at MergeLabs.

This infrastructure captures both planning and execution knowledge in a structured way. That data can be connected to an LLM to start feeding the team with insights. That means each team member can then communicate directly with the organization’s event-coordination brain. When you onboard a new person, they don’t start from zero. They have the organization’s collective experience supporting them from day one.

It’s clear how AI is changing how we work, but the value will manifest very differently depending on whether you run a small business or work inside a large organization.

So, two questions for you:

Have you tried vibe coding yet? If yes, what did you build? Give it a try, or tell me what you’d want to build, and I can give it a try for you as a soft start. If you pick your smallest, most annoying repetitive task and throw it at an AI, you might surprise yourself.

If you’re running a team, what would it mean for your organization if every event cycle made the whole team smarter, not just the people in the room?