The Big Question
What’s the step above vibe coding? Is it still vibe coding?
Introduction
- Vibe coders - or at least the meme of a vibe coder - is someone that is coding up a project entirely AI without any programming knowledge.. so of course chaos and weird issues arise due to inexperience
- What happens though when a programmer doesn’t intentionally go to “vibe code” but instead uses AI to code up something new to them
Personal Example
- I recently needed to create a google news sitemap
- Had to update once daily
- Needed to be completely free (hosting and all)
- Could not host it on the same server as the website that it serves
- Needed to be custom coded in order to be free - tried Make and Zapier but kept bumping up against limitations on their free plans
- This was for a Webflow website, so I needed to use the Webflow API (or scrape, but API seemed to be the best solution according to my research)
- So I “vibe coded” a solution on GitHub using GitHub Pages & Github Actions using node.js
- I’ve never used node.js before
- I’ve never used Github Pages or GitHub Actions before either
- I haven’t attempted to use the Webflow API before, but have used other APIs in the past
- ChatGPT was able to:
- Help me write the code
- Get the repo set up on GitHub
- Help with troubleshooting issues and test cases
- ChatGPT was not able to:
- Figure out that we were barking up the wrong tree - we got stuck for a while and I realized that we were coding in APIv1 when we needed to be coding in APIv2 - When I realized this I sent ChatGPT the info it needed and then it corrected the code and everything else around it (but the bot was unable to figure out this as a troubleshooting step)
- Realize that publishing an API publicly is never a good idea and that even though it was read only on public data - I created a second key and then deleted it (we were troubleshooting so needed to hardcode an API key temporarily for a few minutes)
- Realize that the API data was not being indexed properly - I went and checked what the raw payload was, realized that ChatGPT was reading it improperly, sent in the new structure and then Chat fixed itself
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