the best vibe coders I know never start from scratch

Sometimes, wanting "more" is a trap... which I learned the embarrassing way.

I remember once when I was a kid, my dad pulled 6 bills out of his pocket.

He had 5 crinkly $1 bills, and one crisp $100 bill.

And he said I could pick (how nice of him)!

Did I want 5 of something, or 1 of something?

Being the enterprising young lad that I was... I obviously chose 5 $1 bills

My brother and sister tried to warn me... but hey - I've always been a little bit stubborn :)

Flash forward two decades, I was running an agency that did a lot of custom website builds

We'd close deals anywhere from $5K to $20K depending on the number of pages, design work, custom stuff, content needed, etc.

And if you asked the SEO-oriented people in the company, they always wanted more at any cost...

More content, more pages, more images... if there was something to be had, they wanted more of it...

But here's what was wild:

The sites that converted the best weren't usually the biggest ones.

They were the ones where we focused on the design, making the thing feel professional, modern, and more pleasing than the competition.

Here's how we did it:

We'd find the top-performing site in another city or a similar industry, study it, and model our build after what was already working.

We didn't try reinventing the wheel or think a janky but large site was "good enough".

We tossed aside the 5 $100 bills and picked up that crisp Benjamin' ($100 bill for all the non-US readers)

In a world where anyone can spin up a UI in 5 minutes flat...

Taste and clarity are the most valuable things in the room.

Any vibe coder can build something that looks right.

It's got the words on the page that they asked for... but it feels like its missing a soul.

Very few can look at a winning site and understand exactly why it wins — then steal that formula with precision.

THAT is the skill you wanna have in the future.

I don't care if you're running an agency, launching an app, or rebuilding your uncle's underwater basket weaving website.

In my latest YouTube video, I walk through exactly how to do this... and I gotta say - it was a breath of fresh air for me, finally getting back to using these tools to build dope systems that produce outputs that really blow you away.

How to find proven, high-converting UI designs — and clone them fast without starting from scratch.

I also dropped the full skill documented on GitHub so you can use it yourself right now.

If you're tired of building things that look cool but don't convert...

Then go check it out here → https://github.com/ragnar-pwninskjold/tech-snacks/tree/main/ui-cloner

That's it for this one...

See ya guys next week!

-Sean