Vibe Coding? In this economy?

I had been avoiding using AI’s as much as possible. Using them to do the work, even for personal throwaway projects felt weird. Does using an AI to help you build something make you less of a creative?

The answer is complex, debatable and highly personal. That said, AI’s are the future (most likely), so I might as way give it a try (begrundingly) so that I’m not behind the curve (😩).

All that in mind and due to my silly human brain forgetting to cancel one of my domains, I decided to give the popular AI Claude a try. Specifically, I wanted to try vibe coding.

Da faq is “vibe coding”?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. The way I understand it, vibe coding is coding with the assitant of an AI to get something working sooner without paying too much attention to the details.

So a rough cut? Prototype? Proof of concept? Vibe coding is creating something quick and dirty that works, pushing it live and (maybe) refactoring it later (also, maybe).

I’ve heard vibe coding come up a lot of Claude, so out of curiousity, I asked it how it would describe vibe coding

Vibe coding is when you prioritize the feeling and aesthetic of a project over strict technical requirements or optimization. It’s coding with your heart, not just your head.

It just hit me that vibe coding most likely mean just coding with the vibe 😅. I can get behind that! The internet needs more whimsy.

The project

The domain I was ready to let go was my How Many Days Until Halloween? project. It’s been around for a bit, but I was finally ready to let it go. Every mid-October I would remember it exists along with my dreams of doing more with it. But since I’ll have the domain for another year, why not vibe code my way into something fresh with my new friend Claude?

Without putting to much thought into it, I created an account, wrote a prompt and got started.

Within moments Claude sampled my existing site and was already responding. Claude asked to clarify what color palette I wanted (soft or saturated), font preferences and how I wanted my Tailwind CSS served.

OK. Those are great starting points. One more response from me and it starts coding. It felt like Disney magic. No joke, within 5 mins of starting the convo, it coded this.

Okay! Not what I was imaging but a really, really solid attempt. It would have taken me a lot of coffee and way too much time to get here. I see the benefit! I skimmed the code and it looks solid. It can be cleaned up sure but it’s solid. For a silly website I was planning on taking down anyway, it’ll work.

What I liked about my first iterations of this project was how weird and fun it was. I had ideas but what else would Claude suggest?

Spooky name generator is right up my alley and should be easy to create even if I didn’t want Claude to do the work for me. Claude also suggested gamification which made me do a double take. Games have been a big part of my personality lately, it’s a whole thing and I had been wanting to make more games for ages now. Now sounds like a good time! So I asked Claude another question.

OKAY! Claude gets me. It is reading my mind? Or is it just tuned in really well for projects like this? Either way, I feel less weird about using an AI for coding. Claude made creating fun again.

In conclusion

I took a leap made some minor changes to the code Claude put out and pushed it live to halloweenti.me. I literally had the idea to try Claude this morning and before the end of the day, I have something new, fresh and viby live on the internet. That’s really cool. This feels closer to the flying cars future we were promised.

Will I use Claude (or another AI) again? Probably, but I’m not sure how much. I don’t need to be making nonsense projects like this but it was fun! And it went faster. So I can move on to doing other projects (nonsense or otherwise).

I think the dangers of using AI to code for you is if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up with bloated, unmaintainable code. Looking at the code that was generated today, I could make edits easily or refactor it entirely. Would this work if I was asking Claude to create a feature for an existing site or app? Probably not. But it may be useful for debugging.

Overall, this was a fun experiment that got me excited about coding again.

Thanks Claude!

Photo by Chris J. Davis on Unsplash