S02E04: My Take on Vibe Coding

04/18/2025, duration: 12:09

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Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Debugging Dan podcast. This episode, I'd like to talk to you about Vibe Coding, what the impact of Vibe Coding is in my newsfeed, and also, more importantly, what Vibe Coding is for me, which is, spoiler alert, different than the common conception of Vibe Coding. I normally record my podcast with video on YouTube, but today I didn't really feel like setting up the video and the audio and moving the laptop and setting up the lights. So I kind of vibed here and just went with the audio-only podcast, and then my mind thought, hey, maybe that gives you a good innovation to look into how to create a pretty video from that, so with a backdrop and maybe a visualization of the audio part of the podcast. So if you're watching this via YouTube, you're looking at the result. Let's get into it.

For those that don't know what it is, it's a term that was coined earlier this year for coding with AI. So basically what you do is you build your projects with AI. So you take an online solution like VZero from Vercel, Bolt. There are other solutions that just help you build something by prompting, or you use an IDE like Visual Studio with Copilot. You could use Cursor, WindServe. There are a lot of IDEs and also extensions for IDEs that enable you to do coding by prompting to an agent and having that agent write code for you.

The thing is with Vibe Coding is that you basically only let the AI do the work. So you tell it a prompt, you check what the result is, and then you tell it what you want to change or why it didn't work. And it enables people with little knowledge of code to also build apps by having AI do the heavy lift. It could also be done by people that do have knowledge with code and just have them auto-accept. It's just a method of working. And Vibe Coding has become kind of popular because it enables people for very little money. So you could have a license or a subscription for $10, $20 and do coding and build your app. So when you have an IDE, you just build it using AI. That's what Vibe Coding is, at least how I understood definition, how it was coined recently.

And the result I also see in my newsfeed. So I follow a lot, no, I follow some subreddits on Reddit related to side projects, SaaS. So I follow a SaaS Reddit, side projects, micro SaaS. And the last few weeks, I really see an influx of posts. And you recognize that they're mostly written by AI about how I built this project in a weekend or in 12 hours or very little time. And it's already making hundreds, 200, 400, thousands of MRRs. Those kinds of posts are really following those subreddits. There are also still some genuine ones, but you see a real uptake on those.

And at least how I see it, those are probably people that use AI to build a product with their ID. And they try to do quick and easy marketing by having AI generate their posts. And when you follow multiple subreddits, you often also see people cross-posting. So you see the same title popping up on the SaaS, the side project or the micro SaaS Reddit, and often just with the same content. Some people, they try to change the content or they have a different title depending on the subreddit, probably more targeting towards the target group, but not everybody does. So those are not the most interesting posts to read or to see.

And I feel that is also a result of Vibe coding. It's lowering the threshold for creating a SaaS. That's what it is often having that hosted. And because that's also pretty easily using VZRL or using a different hosting solution, you just point it to your GitHub and you get a URL. Sometimes the posts don't even have their own URL, so they just share the virtual URL dot, I believe it's called dot, you get a project ID dot virtual dot dev or something like that. But yeah, at least I feel that that's because of the lower threshold and because it's now easier to build things with AI, people are trying that.

And that does not necessarily mean that the quality is lower. There are some things that are probably often overlooked with how the quality of the AI work is, like security performance, things like that. But it doesn't necessarily mean that Vibe coding results in a different quality. What does result in a lower quality is that people are trying to get rich quick. So they build something with AI in a couple of hours. They just slap on a fancy landing page and just send out some posts and try to gain traction, build off of that. That's less fun because that results in the post in Flux on Reddit, for example, but also other social networks, which basically just trash. It doesn't really have any contents. It doesn't really have any benefit because I believe that these Reddits are more about sharing experiences, tips, and not really about posting your product projects.

Somebody already suggested in one of the subreddits to have a weekly promote my SaaS thread and just have everybody post there so that the other stuff is better readable and not as much as a promotion. And I like that idea. So my take on Vibe coding, I have a feeling or maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but I have a different association with the word Vibe. Some background is I use Cursor. That's my favorite IDE. And I already recognize that it takes a while to get used to getting the right output out of it.

I also follow the Cursor subreddit and I see a lot of people there complaining, yeah, I'm prompting and it doesn't follow the prompt and it does all kinds of different things. And at least for me, a part of that seems to stem from not knowing how to prompt correctly. It's not automatically going to recognize everything you're saying, but it's kind of a work to prepare the right prompt. So you need to express what you want in the right way. And what is also important is that you mention the right files in your prompt so that it already knows them from the context and knows what direction you're pointing in. It's not that good in getting a generic prompt and then finding out where it needs to do the changes. That often results in a lot of unwanted changes in not applicable parts of your code.

And so that takes a while to get used to, but when it works, it makes stuff faster. So I use it, for example, for simple things that I don't bother remembering, like adding a MySQL service to a Docker Compose file. I can look it up and add it, but I can also just use Cursor just to add two, three, four, five lines with a MySQL service and then update it to the username and a password that I want. And I also use it for bigger things like generating unit tests, but also features. And I use it personally and I also use it at the company when it's allowed by the customer because there's a whole lot of laws around that, having sharing data with the companies, with the LLMs, so it's not allowed for everything.

I've also tried using voice to generate the prompts. For me, that's kind of a hit and miss. Sometimes it's very easy and sometimes it doesn't really recognize me. And because I also often mention files, that makes it more complex because you can't really mention files from voice. So that's a hit and miss for me. I'm also, I know how to type blindly, so I'm a pretty fast typer. And so I can also express myself pretty fast via typing. Another downside for me is that I like to listen to music while I am coding. And if you then activate the hotkey for recording your voice, it turns on microphone mode and then your audio gets garbled. That kind of then, you know, it affects me in my thinking.

Hey, something changes and then I'm not that good in expressing myself. So I need to think about pausing the music, recording my voice and then enabling the music again, which is tedious at least. And for me, the word vibe is really more about going along with the vibe. That's the association that I have with the word. So going with the flow. And for me, that currently expresses itself in me not really having one project to focus on, but I kind of follow the flow. So currently I have an idea that I want to improve my sharing on social media, generating content.

And I figured that I read articles in my newsreader, I don't read everything, but some of these things are interesting to share or just aggregate that. So what I'm doing is after the rebuild of my newsreader, I store a red flag of things that I really read. I opened it and I read it. And that flag I now use to retrieve a bunch of URLs every week. So that's what I'm working on and not actually in code, but I'll get to that. So I retrieve a list of URLs and then I kind of moderate that. Is that it really interesting to share? And what I hope to do is get a short list of like five to 10 articles that I can then either generate a video from, create a newsletter or something else and just be able to repurpose that content.

And I'm not using code currently. I'm using N8N. I don't really know how to pronounce it, but it's a piece of software that allows you in a web interface to define flow. So you have a trigger and then the flow starts and then you can retrieve data via HTTP or via, from your Notion table. And there are all kinds of nodes and you can develop your own nodes. And it's kind of like, it's a no-code tool or low-code because you can execute some JavaScript as part of your flow. And I use that to retrieve the data from the database, create Notion pages for that. And after that, moderate the Notion pages based on each URL and add a flag, use or ignore.

And that's cool. I have already used the software N8N for a while. I used it for simple things, but now I'm creating more complex flows and I really like the experience. The codes that are offered are sufficient, so I haven't really felt the need to generate something custom. So that's pretty cool. And for me, currently, that is really vibe coding. So I went with the vibe of trying to generate more content using that. And after this, I may be going into fixing some blog posts, features on my debuggingdan.com site if I feel like it. So I'm trying to go along with the vibe more instead of creating big projects like I did with ObserverLize or Teletron, which did not get any traction. So I feel I might be better currently in terms of time, energy and enthusiasm.

Just follow the enthusiasm part and I do want to be finishing stuff. So the risk there is when you're going along with the vibe, you get it to a certain point, you don't like it anymore and you stop. But I do want to get it to a working point and then vibe along and do the other project. Just use AI and you're in the IDE to program stuff. That's what I really do want. And that's vibe coding for me. So that's what I feel about it. Let me know what you think. You can find me on Blue Sky on YouTube and yeah, I'll talk to you later. Yeah.