The Vibe Coding Stack is the minimal three-tool setup for describing what you want and having AI build most of it: Cursor as an AI-native editor that indexes your whole codebase and can implement a feature from a single sentence, Claude as the reasoning partner you turn to for planning a feature, debugging a stuck agent, or reviewing a diff before you commit it, and Vercel as the one-command deploy target that turns a finished change into a shareable link. None of the three requires local infrastructure work to get started, and all three have free tiers generous enough to build and ship a real side project before you need to pay for anything. The workflow is simple on purpose: describe the feature to Cursor's agent, review every change it proposes rather than accepting it blindly, bounce a hard problem or an unfamiliar error over to Claude when the editor's agent gets stuck, and push to Vercel once the flow works end to end. It's the stack to start with — not because it's the most powerful combination in this directory, but because it's the smallest one that actually gets an idea from a blank editor to a live URL, which is the whole point of vibe coding.
1. Describe the feature to Cursor's agent and review every change it proposes
2. Bounce hard problems or unfamiliar errors over to Claude
3. Iterate until the core flow works end to end
4. Deploy to Vercel and share the link