I was chatting to some friends on IRC about my experience vibe coding so far. Figured I might as well take some time to check in about that. I suppose first I should say that I am definitely not an AI coding guru, I have pretty minimal experience with it so far.

On some of my computers I have vscode configured with Github Copilot which gives me some auto-complete type support using AI technology. This is sometimes useful and sometimes not. I am yet to use Claude in vscode.

Mostly when I’m vibe coding something I am using ChatGPT via its web interface. I have a “Plus” account with them that I pay for each month. Usually I will ask it to do something for me, it will give me a pretty useful response, then I might get it to tweak a thing or two, or I might edit myself for a few tweaks, and we’re done. Following are things I have done like this recently.

Times Tables Practice. This was an app that I got ChatGPT to help me write. You need a large monitor to view this, it won’t work on your phone. This actually evolved in stages. First I got the 15 x 15 grid on the left working, then the visualization in the middle, then the visualization on the right. It was pretty ugly integrating those bits and pieces, I just copied-and-pasted them into one big file but didn’t take any effort to make them mutually consistent. I have been debating myself about what I should have done here. Maybe I should have used separate JavaScript and CSS files for each major feature so it was clear which code was generated with each feature, or if I should do what I did and just paste it all into the same HTML file. I’m still not sure about that, but the mono-HTML file does work.

Mental Arithmetic Practice. These are practice questions mostly to help me learn my fifteen times tables, but they have simple addition and subtraction questions too. This was pretty much one shot, I asked ChatGPT to make it and I got this result pretty much on the first try. I needed to make a very small edit to make “Random” the default choice instead of “Addition”.

Arithmetic Practice. These are longer arithmetic practice questions which require a pen and paper to figure out. ChatGPT got this pretty much right first go, but I made some minor tweaks to improve legibility and the results when printing on A4 paper.

Thevenin Equivalent Practice. This was my first go at generating practice questions for Thevenin equivalent circuits. This wasn’t quite what I was after so I gave it anther go.

Thevenin Equivalent Practice v2. This was my second go at Thevenin equivalent circuit practice. The visualization as given is pretty shit and I kinda gave up on this. Now my plan is to work through example problems I found elsewhere on the internet: Thevenin & Norton practice problems.

So that’s three successful vibe coding projects and two failures.