Confessions of a Vibe Coder

(Photo by Daniel Joshua on Unsplash)

While I continue to have strong reservations about the wholesale adoption of AI-based technologies in general, I have an unsurprising confession: I'm still using AI.

I'm just not using it for everything.

The idea of the internet being flooded with AI-generated slop that increasing indiscriminate users accept as legitimate content still scares the hell out of me– particularly a year out from a potentially pivotal U.S. election that might well be either decided or suppressed on the basis of such slop.

On the other hand, I'm currently trying to develop a digital consulting practice as (for now) a one man shop. I need all the productivity tools I can get. I don't have a team of developers on call. If I need code written to complete a project, that code is getting written by me.

Fortunately, this isn't completely a problem. I've been coding on various platforms for most of my life. But I can't deliver on my own something I would normally have a team for on a realistic timeline... not without a little help.

After a little shopping around, I settled on using perplexity.ai as my digital assistant for getting stuff done. I had not hear the term vibe coding until after I was actually doing it. I don't particularly even like the term, but now that the marketing people have picked up on it… we're probably stuck with it.

My initial use case was to save myself the time required to develop complex spreadsheet formulae. Since I don't spend my entire life in Excel, being able to use a bot to write this stuff is an absolute godsend. Since then, I've used it to turn meeting transcripts into summaries and develop rough-draft project plans. The results were not as impressive and required a lot more manual intervention before meeting my standards for professional work documents.

But I was still saving time.

Now I'm using it to write actual damn production code in PHP. I'm approaching this pretty much the way I used to approach assigning work to offshore developers: provide requirements in exhaustive detail, expect no creativity, and assume you may have to repeat yourself a few times.

Working with a digital assistant is like working with a really bright offshore dev… one that you suspect might be doing drugs. But if it's keeping me from doing drugs to hit a deadline, I'm strangely okay with that. I managed to get accomplished in one day what I could easily have spent a week on, including research and testing, working by myself.

I'll be talking more about this project fairly soon. It's something I'm fairly excited about.  For now, I'm just happy I found a way to get it back on track.

Cheers!

--MM