What in the Vibe is coding on?

We've all done, whether we want to admit it or not. Whether we hid in a corner or put it out there for the world to see, we have dabbled in the dark arts of letting a machine do our work for us. Remember when you were younger and saw some cool karate or kung fu movie wishing you could do it, and then you'd try it - in the safety and lack of exposure in your room - then when you fail you turn to look around to see who else saw it. Well that is all me when it comes to vibe coding. I claimed myself to be some purist! I will write every last line of code! I will not let some machine do something for me when I am better than it!! I promise .... zzzzz.... I'm so tired of myself.

So I did it...

Chat

As most would, the curiosity first took me to ChatGPT. Why? It was the most popular. The game changer. The one ring to rule them all. It was honestly very fun. Being in software, I immediately jumped to how much of the menial and administrative tasks I tend to slack on and get bored off I can pass off to this amazing technology. Until I realised how much of a parent I needed to be to it. Then thinking I should just do it myself. Then thinking I'm tired and surely if I prompt better it will do better. Stuck in this loop (to date in many ways) of hope and frustration only to realise that other's have a similar feeling.

So after finding/discovering other models like Claude's Anthropic, Google's Gemini and China's Deepseek (I think it is owned by an individual so I apologise for the lack of qualification here), I essentially spent my time finding out which out frustrated me the least for a certain problem. This isn't going to be a huge breakdown. Just an introduction to my experiences using LLM's.

The point of this all being is that the Chat feature on these LLM's opened up an awesome avenue for me to do a few things more easily

1. Learn better about the problem I was trying to solve
2. Quick fix simple issues saving me a ton of time
3. Speed running administrative tasks
4. Document formatting
5. General learning about a technology I am interested in using

All this led to the inevitable - why can't this thing just understand a larger context of what I require and just follow my instructions to do what I need to?

Coding Agents

Using Cursor was like seeing the light, seeing possibilities and seeing a way to become some super developer who can spawn things out of thin air. And mostly that I am the only one who can do this!! (whilst using software that many other's developed for people like me to use lol). In reality, it was genuinely really fun. Like anything, it equalises at some point and that point was additional size and complexity. So like anyone else I again went through the loop of love, frustration, anger and then back to love again.

Again, just a simple review for now. I did try out other tools similar to Cursor like Windsurf and VSCode (current), and whilst both are perfectly fine, all the solutions have obvious limits. Now being a relatively seasoned developer, I could navigate a lot of it by just fixing it myself, so off the bat I can recommend that if you don't know what you are doing please do not rely on something like this. Just a small piece of advice.

So I have already planned my next blog post, which I think is the most important finding from this all including some great (in my humble opinion) advice around how you can make the most out of modern LLM's.

Code to your hearts content

The next post is going to be filled with some great content and advice so stay tuned...

Love and Respect.