Vibe Coding
I’ve been having an absolute blast using Claude code to help me build some little tools that I’ve wanted for years and then expand on them beyond my wildest dreams. It’s super empowering and fun to be able to quickly create something. At the same time I also realize that I’m using AI tools that have been created less than ethically. How do we square the fact that something can be super helpful to a lot of people with the fact that it’s harmed others?
Spoiler: I’ve no friggin idea.
Obviously I’ve made the choice to use these tools, for better or worse. I hope that I’ve made, if not the right choice, not a bad one. I’ve tried rationalizing that I’d use more power than they’d get back in money but obviously I can’t prove that. So I’m stuck with hoping and knowing I’m not the only person struggling with this.
The ethical concerns aside (a big caveat), it’s been so so so so sooooo fun and empowering to build things that I’d never have had the ability to make on my own. AI coding tools put a ton of power in your hands and you can use that however you want. I used them to make some fun little niceties for my life (and this blog). I don’t expect to keep paying for Claude code but I might dabble with it every now and then when I need the help with stuff.
It’s truly astounding what AI coding tools can do now. I was able to have it build out (with minimal direction and input from me):
- A podcast live stream recording system with multiple rules
- Post processing to improve the live audio
- RSS feed for the live recordings
- Show notes and artwork retrieval system to pull from the published episode once that goes up and add that to my live recordings
- Another RSS feed that holds all of my DRM free audio books with it’s own api query of Apple Books to get the cover art (if needed) and book description
- An RSS feed tokenization system so that only I can access my RSS feeds (or my friends if I deign to)
- This very blog!
- The platform it runs on, the systems that maintain it
- Tools to help me create link and recommendation posts super quick and easy
- A feature image creator that takes emoji and glyphs I select to make the photos that go with a lot of the posts
- An image “grabber” that lets me easily grab a photo from a site to use it in a post about that site
- A system that converts all of the images on my site to be as compressed and small as possible to make my site super duper fast
- A web dashboard to monitor, maintain, and control all of the above systems
- And the AI coding agent even helped me migrate this system from a home Mac mini to a little Linux server in the cloud!
All of that in less than two weeks of me giving it instructions to boot, it would have done it sooner if I didn’t have to sleep or work! 😂
Since 2020 when AI first took off I’ve heard that it wasn’t very good at complex stuff and it did sloppy work. The slop may still be there, I can’t write or read code and I can’t inspect it to tell, but it damn sure works. It works so well that it’s scary.
If you haven’t seen news about AI causing huge security flaws across the internet and your computers you will as it happens more and more often. Some of this is the good team keeping stuff safe and some of it is other people hacking into stuff that then needs to get patched and fixed. It’s a war that no one is going to win but it’s a war we’re all silently caught in the crossfire of.
AI is also super helpful to researchers, scientists, and everyday people. It’s helping to cure and detect diseases, improve our understanding of the universe, and improve our normal lives. I wish I had an answer to whether AI is good or bad for us, but all I can say is to make your own choices and try to be understanding for those that make different choices.
