When Block product designer Cynthia Chen first dreamed up the idea of an app that could catalogue dogs spotted in the wild, she shelved it. "The hurdle was so big, so I never did anything," she said.

Can a non-developer use vibe coding to build and deploy a full-stack app? And can that app actually do anything useful? I used to be a developer, many decades ago, but I’m not one any longer. The ...