Vibe coding is groovy

Vibe coding is most definitely having a moment.

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of it—the Wikipedia page for it just went up on March 15 of this year. Vibe coding is a new way of working with AI, where you guide the code through natural language and intuition, rather than spelling out every detail or actually writing the code. You express the “vibe” of the app and the AI does the grunt work.

Last month I wrote about how generative AI will change how we develop and write code. This past weekend I had a perspective-altering experience with vibe coding that I’d like to tell you about.

For the past few years, I’ve had a couple of ideas for websites knocking around in my head. Nothing too ambitious—just fun little ideas that would give folks a laugh or a moment of interest. I’ve always wanted to build a website that takes off—maybe even earns a little revenue. If things turned out well, I might even make a living at it. Who knows?

But of course, finding the time to build one of these sites is a challenge. It seems like not many of us have the leisure time to work on a side project that may or may not be revenue-generating. As a result, none of my obviously brilliant ideas were turned into an actual thing. Until this weekend.

Hello, Claude Code

Someone—I wish I could remember who, so I could properly thank them—pointed me in the direction of Claude Code. Built by Anthropic, Claude Code is a large language model (LLM) tuned specifically to helping developers and building things in code. You install it in the directory where your project resides, and it runs on the command line.  Claude Code can read your entire application structure, understand it, answer questions about it, and most importantly, make changes to it that you ask for in plain language. 

It works very well. Astonishingly well. Terrifyingly well.

I started with a completely blank Astro application. I created a file called claude.md and gave Claude thorough instructions on the general rules I wanted it to follow, including strict TypeScript typing and always using the “Astro way” of doing things according to the documentation, which I referenced via its URL.

Once I had done that, I gave Claude a paragraph describing my application, how I wanted the app to work, a general description of how I wanted it to look, and how I wanted to do authentication. In less than an hour, I had a basic site up and running. No, really. About an hour. It took about three more hours to fine-tune it, add features, and tweak the user interface.

Claude is aware of all the code in the directory where its command line tool is run. It can see the entire context of your application and can make changes on the fly. You can ask to approve all the changes or just let it do its thing.

Much of the time spent was me looking at the code it had written and fixing a few things. Occasionally, it would run off on a strange tangent and I had to reel it back in, but ultimately, it completed in hours what may have taken me weeks to figure out. I’m not an Astro genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m smart enough to know good code when I see it and I understand Astro’s basic way of doing things. 

The amazing thing was that Claude added all kinds of little touches that I didn’t ask for, including avatar support in the login screen, the inclusion of the name of the user, and the date the user posted something. I simply typed “I’d like to be able to edit the entries that I have made,” and Claude just did it, providing a lovely UI for editing and links in all the right places. I asked Claude to “add tastefully located Google Adsense ads” and it did so, including a placeholder for testing and a switch to show real ads in production. It just knew what the “right” thing to do was and it did it. 

Way to code, Claude

The downside? Claude Code wasn’t cheap—it cost me about $50 in processing fees. You can burn through cash pretty quickly. But when I consider the countless hours of work it saved me, it was well worth it. As I went along, I became more careful about what I asked it to do.

This experience has changed the way I will code going forward. I will leverage my coding experience to get Claude Code to do all the heavy lifting. It was almost as though I was pair-programming with a very capable junior developer who was eager to write all the code while I told her what to do. 

It is important to note that Claude will not enable a newbie to suddenly write code. Critical to this whole process was my knowing what to ask for at the start—frameworks, coding guidelines, etc.—as well as knowing when Claude was going off the rails and doing things that were well off the path of best practices. Keeping things on track was a large part of the work. 

But this is just the beginning of vibe coding, and it probably won’t be too long before anyone can build what they want, and then our creativity will be the limit to what can be done. But I tell you, it was a big revelation to me to have something I’ve fretted about doing for months up and running in a single afternoon. Happily, that appears to be the norm going forward, and it is only going to get better.