Vibe Coding

There are certain technologies that come along and you wonder, where is this going to make a true impact in my life? The LLMs that are out there are pretty amazing. You can imagine new pictures, make new memes, create poems and rap songs. Upload a book and turn it into a podcast with almost no effort at all.

And then there are the coding agents.

I’ve been a programmer almost my entire career. The past 6 years I have been supporting engineers who run services that support Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. The coding agents are a game changer. Recently at work I was able to tell a LLM, with just a few short sentances of what I wanted it to do, where the code lived, a simliar example of the work and let it go. With minutes it had code generated, test run and ready for me to run a test before sending on to a peer and then production. IN MINUTES!!!

This was such an eye opener for me that I signed up for a claude personal account that day. In the past 4 days, I’ve already been more productive on side projects than I have in years! You can see the result at midwestwoodlab.com. This was developed the same way, a little bit of instruction breaking down the problem and within an hour I had a website that I was ready to ship. Like out the door good enough to show the world.

If you are a developer and thinking, this doesn’t have the same quality, same craftmanship, its a new way of doing it and I don’t like it. Those are all fine, and I get that. And if you like your bits hand crafted so be it. BUT… its a whole new world and you are going to have to embrace some of it. Think of it this way, how much more productive could you be if you take the simple items, or items that you suck at (because you know those exist) and give it to the AI to generate for you and you go and work on the hard stuff. You still have the control over the process and what is put out there into the world. I think you’ll be surprised at how productive you can be.

Will this solve all the worlds problems? Absolutely not. But just in the last week, I don’t think I have been this productive in years.