3 Vibe Coding Mistakes: What I Got Wrong Building My Directory Website

I've been building a directory website with Claude Code and v0 for months now — no coding background, no web dev experience, just me and some AI tools trying to figure it out. In the first couple of weeks I made three vibe coding mistakes that cost me real time and some money, and I wanted to walk through what actually went wrong. Mistake #1: I waited too long to ask the people who'd actually use this what they wanted. I built the whole database around my own intuition until a friend pointed out she'd prefer something else. That one comment meant rebuilding the schema from scratch. Mistake #2: I designed the front end in v0 before the data structure was even settled. It's just more fun to pick colors than to think through data models, so I did the fun part first and paid for it later. Mistake #3: I picked my web scraping tool (Apify) because I kept hearing people talk about it, not because I'd actually compared all my options. It got expensive, and it wasn't even that good for my use case. I'm still testing other options and I'll walk through that comparison in an upcoming video. None of this is a knock on any of the tools i used — they handled the backend, the deploy, and the site design better than I expected for someone who'd never touched any of this before. The mistakes were just my learning curve. If you're building a directory website (or anything data-heavy) with AI tools and you've made similar mistakes, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.. everyone learns the hard way at least once! #VibeCoding #DirectoryWebsite #ClaudeCode