When I first heard of the name “Vibe Coding” from a friend of mine at work, I admit that I underestimated it big time. I thought it was just another buzzword for “Deep Work” or “Focus Time”, but for coding, I was wrong..
Unlike what the name solely suggests, this concept is not just about feeling the “cool vibes 😎🤙” of coding, it is actually a new coined term for combining the creative flow of coding and AI-assisted programming. It is the idea of relying on descriptive prompts in the aims of generating things faster without getting bogged down in extensive details of the technical nitty gritty.
Andrej Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI was actually the mastermind behind this new kind of coding, so no wonder it had taken the waves of attention recently.
Trying it out 👀
Since I was curious, I immediately tried out one of the few tools that enables exactly this concept in the market — my weapon of choice was Cursor AI (The free hobby version of course, gotta try it before I buy it!)
First impressions 🧐
Installation was easy and fast. Smooth sailing, no issues. ⛵️
I then opened the Cursor IDE —my first impression so far is that it looks clean with intuitive design, a bit similar to Visual Studio Code. I was able to immediately spot the place to run the prompts within the IDE. 👍
It is definitely more advanced than what GitHub Co-Pilot is today.
Putting it to the test 🧪
I wanted to take it for a spin, so I opened one of my repo containing a simple static website.
I started out with asking it to do easy things like changing the colour of a side panel that exists across all of the pages.
It’s able to instantly locate the relevant files to change and immediately changed the files needed to make the colour switch happen. 😯
Then I tested the result by asking it to output the page into a browser.
So, did the change work..? 🥁🥁🥁
Hang on, there is a plot twist! I actually expect that it shouldn’t work.. because the colour Grey doesn’t exist for this theme. I wanted to see if the agent will pick this up and pass the test.
Well.. the most surprising thing is that it was able to figure this out when you ask for it to run the site locally! It swapped Grey to Brown instead, a colour that exist as a valid option.
I was shocked, it passed the test.. but I wasn’t convinced just yet, I need to visibly see if the change came to be. So I went to the browser and see it for myself..
Well.. as you can see, it certainly worked! It’s changed to brown! 🍫
Just from this alone, I’m convinced this is going to take developer experience to new heights, but then the next thing that crossed my mind was instant fear 😱 — I thought..
“This can definitely take over many jobs in Data and Software Engineering, should I be worried?”
But then, my thinking quickly diverted back into the endless ✨ possibilities ✨ it can bring:
“Actually, hold on.. Imagine all the things I can now build with this! I’m excited!”
All of a sudden, the idea of building things that previously would require extensive upskilling on my part doesn’t seem so daunting to me anymore.
Closing Thoughts 🤔 💭
I completely get the good vibes now 👏
This had so far impressed me beyond expectations. It’s not only capable of generating code via prompts but it can also invoke actions and automate things. It must certainly be good for debugging too 🐛
From now on, it’s already certain for me that this type of tools will be the new go-to for my day-to-day!
However, like with most LLMs and GPTs, I genuinely think it’s usefulness significantly decreases once there is a need to write a more complex and in depth algorithms.
But then again, these things evolve very rapidly over the course of recent years, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this space will advance even further!