I Finally Get The Vibe Coding Hype

The power, the majesty, the pure thrill of creation, vibe coding is all these things and absolutely none of them at the same time.

I am learning vibe coding (VC) from Louie Bacaj. Until Louie’s course I hadn’t tried VC and had heard mixed things, from people claiming to have automated their whole business to people saying the buggy vibe code has ruined their codebase. I was unsure what to expect

Louie started by showing us a how you can create a game with a planet being orbited by an object and some other objects in space coming towards it and the objective is for the orbiter to not get hit.

He also offered the optional add-ons of some creative flourishes, I decided to make my orbiter look like a potato as that seemed funny in my head. The whole game was up and running in less than a minute. Some simple prompts and I had a whole working game, it was like that scene in Inception when Leonardo Dicaprio’s character takes Elliot Page’s character into the dream world and Elliot’s character realises that making stuff in the dream is “pure creation” and can’t get enough. I was through the looking glass on this one.

This video is how VC feels

Next, I thought, why is my potato so lame and uninteresting, so I added spots, like a real potato, boom! Done. Then I thought, potatoes don’t fear asteroids, they fear chefs, so I asked the AI to make the asteroids into tiny chefs with knives. The chefs didn’t look like chefs at all, so I changed tack and went with a mushroom orbiting a planet, in 8-bit style, because I was picturing the Super Mario mushrooms. But, I thought the real enemy of mushrooms was pigs, so I had the asteroid chefs turned into pigs who eat my mushroom. They were meant to oink when they took a bite, but I guess I forgot that there is no sound in space (and to install a sound effects library).

The planet being orbited was a plain blue blob, so I added some continents (I apparently forgot in my mushroom trying to evade scary pigs narrative that orbiting a planet in space no longer made sense). All these things were almost what I pictured in my head. Like draftsman drawing something but not quite being able to grasp that lifelike quality. I don’t think VC is perfect, but the super fast results were like a high. I was in a flow-state and stopped myself after 45 minutes of beautiful creation, as I was in a coworking event and the timer ran out. I imagine if I hadn’t been stopped, I would still be perfecting my pig mushroom world. Getting the curls on those tails just right and the oinks that perfect hideous noise.

Here is the fruit of my labours