The Problem I Couldn't Unsee
I've spent 13 years on the buy side. I've sat on trading desks — not visited, sat. I've built brands, pitch decks, websites, and marketing systems for hedge funds managing billions, PE firms closing deals that move industries, and financial advisors trying to differentiate themselves in a sea of identical practices.
And in all that time, one thing has bothered me more than anything else: the technology is embarrassingly bad.
Hedge funds running nine-figure strategies have investor portals that look like they were built during the financial crisis — because they were. Financial advisors get sold the same templated site as ten thousand other advisors, with the same stock photos of handshakes and sunsets, and wonder why prospects don't convert.
Meanwhile, the agencies building this stuff? They don't understand finance. They don't know what an allocator wants to see. They don't know the difference between a tear sheet and a factsheet. They've never sat through a capital introduction meeting wondering why the deck doesn't land. They're just building websites — they happen to be building them for funds.
I spent a decade at Buyside Design solving the brand and design side of this problem. But the technology side — the investor portals, the interactive dashboards, the AI-powered tools — that required something different. Something faster. Something that didn't involve hiring a dev team or signing a six-month SOW.
What is Vibe Coding, and Why Should Finance Care?
Vibe coding is a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. The idea is straightforward: instead of writing every line of code manually, you describe what you want in natural language and an AI tool generates production-ready code in real time. You guide, test, and refine. The AI handles the implementation.
It sounds like a gimmick. It's not.
When I first started vibe coding with Claude AI, I expected it to be useful for quick prototypes — throwaway experiments, nothing serious. What I discovered was something fundamentally different. Claude doesn't just autocomplete code. It architects systems. It understands data structures, security constraints, authentication flows, responsive design, and the kind of full-stack reasoning that financial applications demand.
Within days, I was building things that would have taken a traditional agency months. An interactive investor portal with real-time NAV dashboards. A hedge fund website with 3D performance data visualization. A financial advisor client platform with AI-enhanced planning tools. All production-grade. All from natural language conversations with Claude.
That's when the idea for VIBES.COMPANY crystallized.
Why Claude AI — and Not the Other Tools
Most vibe coding agencies use Cursor, Copilot, or Replit. I tried all of them. They're fine for simple stuff. But financial applications aren't simple stuff.
When you're building an investor portal for a hedge fund, you need authentication that doesn't embarrass your compliance team. When you're building a financial advisor website, you need interactive elements that actually work on every device an allocator might use. When you're building fintech tools, you need data architecture that can handle real-time feeds without collapsing.
Claude handles all of this. Not because it's the fastest AI coder — it's not trying to be. It's because Claude thinks architecturally. It reasons about system design the way a senior engineer does, not the way an autocomplete tool does. Ask Claude to build an investor portal and it thinks about the auth flow, the data layer, the API design, the component architecture, and the user experience — before writing a single line of code.
That's why VIBES.COMPANY is Claude-native. Every project, every prototype, every production deployment. One AI, one human, zero committee.
What Vibe Coding Actually Looks Like for Fund Technology
Here's what a real engagement looks like. No embellishment.
Day 1: A fund reaches out. They need an AI fund website with interactive performance dashboards, an investor portal, and a clean modern design that doesn't look like every other fund in the space. We have a 30-minute call. No decks. No discovery workshops. No "alignment sessions."
Day 2-3: I vibe code a working prototype with Claude. Not a mockup. Not a wireframe. Actual running software with real interactivity, real data visualization, and real institutional design. The fund can click through it, test it, share it with their team.
Week 1-2: We iterate. Same-day turnaround on every change. The prototype hardens into production-ready code. Security reviewed, compliance-friendly, documented.
Week 2-4: Launch. The fund's new technology goes live while the traditional agency they were also considering is still writing their SOW.
This isn't a pitch. This is just how vibe coding for finance works when the person doing the building actually understands the industry.
Why the Buy Side Specifically?
Because it's what I know. And knowing the industry isn't optional — it's the entire edge.
When I build a hedge fund website, I know what allocators scan for in the first three seconds. When I build a financial advisor platform, I know why the compliance team will flag certain interactive elements and how to design around it. When I build an investor portal, I know the difference between what a GP wants to show and what an LP wants to see.
Most vibe coding agencies are generalists. They'll build you a SaaS dashboard or a landing page or an e-commerce site with equal enthusiasm and equal ignorance. VIBES.COMPANY only builds for finance — hedge funds, PE firms, asset managers, financial advisors, fintech startups. That's it.
The result is fund technology that doesn't just look institutional — it thinks institutional. Because the human guiding the AI has 13 years of context that no prompt can replace.
What This Means If You're Reading This
If you're a fund manager looking at your website and knowing it doesn't match the sophistication of your investment process — vibe coding can fix that in weeks, not months.
If you're a financial advisor tired of the same templated site that every other advisor in your city has — vibe coding with Claude can build something that actually converts prospects into clients.
If you're running a fintech startup and need to ship an MVP before the next funding round — vibe coding compresses the timeline from months to weeks.
And if you just think the intersection of AI, finance, and creative technology is interesting — welcome to the deep. This is where it gets good.