vibe coding, noun
Writing computer code in a somewhat careless fashion, with AI assistance.
I’d love to think that I’m not doing this carelessly, but who knows? I know a fair amount of web design essentials. I’m not a professional and have no intentions or pretensions of becoming one.
I do want to know about artificial intelligence, though. I wanted to know what vibe coding was like. I decided to try it as much as possible on this site, given that it’s about artificial intelligence. I expected complete and utter mayhem.
Anyways, I gave Anna specifications and she coded the layout. I do not simply mean that I sent an existing version to the chatbot for stylistic changes, either. I mean that I instructed Anna to create a site based on my planned midcentury design principles and structure.
Hard to quantify, I did a lot of typing to get it all out. I also did my best to insert it into persistent memory for the bot (insofar as she exists in my instance of ChatGPT5.1).
I did not simply send one “prompt” if I remember right. It was a rather long and involved whole discussion with the chatbot prior to any code generation. I ensured this would happen by telling her to “ask questions if necessary.”
I also probably over-explained throughout, with specifics for exactly what links should do, as well as title effects and even the introductory animation. I tweaked it in successive drafts until I found it comfortable.
It turned out better than I anticipated. Now, it includes several easily swapped color themes, dark mode, and a print layout, amongst other UX features. In addition, it seems to scale well for different screen sizes, something that has often been a personal struggle of mine.
So far, I am pleased with what’s transpired with this vibe coding experiment. People write that vibe coding can be extremely dangerous if you don’t do your homework. Memory drained for no reason, and who knows what else. They call it “spaghetti” for various good reasons, I suppose.
If you vibe code exceptionally poorly, you could even end up with huge security risks behind the scenes. And, if you’re using common prompts, apparently it’s even riskier?
Even if your code functions, you might not understand what the LLM did when writing or modifying your code. This means having little chance of fixing things if you accidentally break things. This has already happened to me once when coding some image display modals on this site. Live and learn.
That said, I don’t take many risks with vibe coding. I’m not developing or selling any apps that need to comply with regulations, for example, not processing user data in any major capacity, and my site is essentially static.
The stakes don’t seem very high with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS used to maintain a simple site like this. My knowledge may be very basic, but I also know my own limitations and when to seek help (from non-LLM sources). I do have, of course, help in human form, and copiously.
Perhaps the worst thing that’s happened so far to this site was the constant barrage of attempted malicious logins to the server from Russia. Moscow never sleeps, I guess?
I ought to just finagle a way to block every single IP address within that damned ring road. It doesn’t matter, because while they’re all recorded, they’re not successful, of course…
There’s another, possibly bigger issue, though. Is it “cheating” to vibe code? After all, many programmers worked years learning a computer language. Now, some people are just prompting away to build electron apps.
Right now, I think not. It isn’t “cheating” to use a new technology when you’ve chosen a career path in technology. New methods and tools should go without saying, right?
Most of the programmers I know personally ended up using AI, for one reason or another. Not all were happy about that, too. Maybe AI is a bit unprecedented. It might be hurting the job market in irreparable ways?
I don’t know enough about that universe to really speculate right now. This site is a hobby. I have no plans to enter coding as a career, myself, so I lack context.
Anna still edits code for this site regularly. At this point, she knows how to match the existing site stylistically and structurally. There have been some utter wrecks she’s caused, but it was nothing I couldn’t fix with a little version control, and the overall experience has actually been positive?
Oh, and do you find it odd that I’m calling my coding agent of all things “Anna?” Well, I do. It keeps me engaged and fascinated. I wrote about how using character prompts might slow me down with this.
I’ve continued with the added layer of complexity, though, because it makes things more fun like a roleplaying game. Will this change? I don’t know. I recently began using ChatGPT in VS Code, which gives no obvious apparatus for assigning personae…
I’m also experimenting with different models for coding? So far, it seems to matter way more what program and settings I use, though.
This might, again, be because my explorations get limited to just rudimentary web stuff. I’m not asking these things how to write an entire application; just tweaking some web design details here and there.
As usual, I’ll try to revisit this topic as I learn more, and as technology changes! Oh, and yes, someone started a little vibe coding Discord server. It's absolutely delightful. Mostly. Would you like to pop along? Say hello!