Dustin Boston

If you haven’t heard of vibe coding, here’s a good summary from Niall McNulty:

Vibe coding is a term for coding with the assistance of AI—essentially, using AI tools to do the heavy lifting of writing code while you focus on guiding the process with ideas and descriptions. The phrase started as a Silicon Valley buzzword (coined by AI expert Andrej Karpathy) to describe 'using AI tools … for the heavy lifting in coding to quickly build software.' In vibe coding, you don’t write every line of code by hand. Instead, you communicate what you want (the “vibe” of the program or feature), and the AI generates the code for you.

Of course, the term comes from Silicon Valley, and the co-founder of OpenAI nonetheless. But let me tell you what my definition is.

When you work as a programmer, you spend your days going after perfection. Finding and fixing bugs, reviewing code, and writing tests for every one of the thousands of lines of code you work with gets to be—well, I call it brain-fry, and it can be exhausting. So sometimes you just need to chill out, and if you’re a nerd like me, what better way than to write code. Except when you write code in your own time, you can do it however you want—no pressure of perfection. However, it can be hard not to “revert” back to work habits, and that makes the whole thing no fun. So, vibe coding.

I start with an HTML file and a single comment—something like, “Make a form for a blog post.” Then I highlight the text and let AI take the wheel. Before you know it, I’ve got a couple hundred lines of code doing exactly what I had in mind, and I didn’t have to write a single line of it. Of course it helps to be a programmer here because you can direct the next move and correct the mistakes.

This time around, I created a single-page web-app to post new content to my website. I call it “Poster Child.” I had an idea of where I wanted to go:

1. A menu on the left, listing my content files
2. Rich text editor for composing posts, preferably Markdown
3. Fields for the title, categories, tags, date, and post slug
4. GitHub as my blog backend and file storage
5. A settings panel to configure the repo and content path

I didn’t start with the layout or planning; I just went right for the fun stuff. I added Quill for the text editor and Octokit to interact with GitHub. I stashed a few items in local storage and then worked my way down through the list, each time writing a comment, having AI complete it, and so on. The rest was polish.

Here’s a note to myself about how to keep the vibe in vibe coding:

1. Start with the fun stuff. Instead of planning out a process, dive right in. Don't Overthink It.
2. Go with what feels good. Allow some AI serendipity. I was dead set on Markdown, but AI showed me a simpler way (HTML).
3. Simple is good: It doesn’t need to be fancy to be useful.