Thoughts on Vibe-coding

Let me just get this out of the way - I’m not much of a programmer. I’ve coded the occasional script or macro over the years and, admittedly, I do use AutoHotkey daily to do stuff, but I’ve not spent a lot of hours pouring over hundreds of lines of intricate code to develop a bespoke application.]

When I was at Microsoft I did some design work on our apps, but that was UX design - the words on the screen and a bit about the flow - I didn’t get involved in the actual code.

“Hey man, I just ride ‘em, I don’t know what makes ‘em work.” -Oddball

When I was a wee lad I coded an app in Basic that would take in a long list of football statistics and other information, and then attempt to predict the winner of NFL football games. How good was it? It successfully predicted the game winner about 50% of the time.

Jump forward to today and now we have AI tools that promise to help us code apps like a pro. I’ve used various AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot…) to try and code some simple apps, with admittedly mixed results.

I used Gemini to code a timer app for my kitchen. I have a few dishes I make that need to “simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally” and I’ve often thought it would be nice to be able to set a 45 minute timer and have it ping me every 5 minutes to go stir. There’s probably already an app like that, but I decided to code my own.

I asked Gemini for it and it quickly gave me some HTML code that I could save to my Windows desktop and…sure enough it creates a pleasant, simple, timer that lets me set a total time, and an interval. I made a couple of refinements (like displaying not only the main timer, but also a countdown to the next “stir”) but in probably less than 15 minutes I had a simple, helpful, tool.

This weekend I tried to use multiple tools to code something I thought might be sort of easy. Famous last words.

I use OneNote pretty heavily; most of the time I have 2-3 OneNote windows open on my computer at a time. One of the things I use it for is what I call “Daily Journal”. Basically it’s a scratch pad with a page for each day where I can jot down notes and reminders to myself and capture info that might otherwise go on the back of an envelope or a Post-It note.

Every Friday I have time blocked out to prep for the following week and the first step of that prep is to create 5 new OneNote pages for Mon-Fri of the following week. It’s a simple but tedious task and I got the idea that maybe I could simplify 2026 by having all those pages created, automatically, in advance.

I went about trying to create a little app or script that would do just that. First I asked Gemini to do it. It tried to create a Python script that would do it, but that involved accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center and some inconvenient permissions. So I asked if there was a more local way to do it since I don’t need to distrubute this tool.

It came back with a VBA script which looked promising but bogged down in a series of errors that Gemini gamely tried to debug but never quite got there. Part of the problem here might have been that Gemini was telling me to use a type library for OneNote that doesn’t seem to actually exist. A discouraging hallucination, if that’s what it was.

Next I went to my trusty AutoHotkey partner agent in ChatGPT. Code With Hottie walked me through a bunch of iterations of a script that tried to use the OneNote API to create the pages.

And much like Gemini, ChatGPT did its best to troubleshoot the endless series of errors those scripts generated. But we never got there.

Over to Copilot where I asked if I could create a macro using Onetastic, the terrific add-in for OneNote that lets you do stuff like this (after I searched to see if Onetastic already had a macro to do it; no joy). Copilot wrote me some code to do exactly that and I set off to create the macro…only to discover that I need a dev license for Onetastic to create macros like that. OK, fair enough.

That wrapped up my Friday afternoon efforts…a little frustrated, but not totally discouraged yet.

After pondering it a bit over the weekend I started this morning determined to give it a fresh try. And we were back to Code with Hottie since I felt like maybe AutoHotkey was going to have the best odds of success.

So I gave Code with Hottie another chance to create a macro for me and…once again, the results were a series of error messages. As we fixed each problem with the code a new problem popped up. It was problems all the way down.

Finally, after this long, interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful tour through the API in which I’d discovered 43 ways to not automate creating pages I went back to Code with Hottie and I said

“Would it be simpler to just do it in the OneNote UI the way a user would, by using CTRL+N to create a page, and setting the page title to the needed date in the right format, then looping through that process as many times needed to create a page for each workday of the year?”

Code with Hottie agreed that could be simpler and wrote me a little script to do that. After I figured out the right way to launch it I gave it a go and…success. It might not have been elegant, but the end result was undeniable…I now had a 2026 section in my OneNote notebook that contained one page for each weekday of the year, with the title properly formatted.

That takes a small, tedious, task off my plate for next year.

When I talk with legal professionals about “vibe-coding” they’re often getting lost in the idea of coding their own case management system or some equally daunting task. You could try to do that, but in fairness there’s probably a much higher chance of productive success in just taking some tasks or little tool that you wish you had, and having the AI help you code or script a better way to do it.

You don’t have to boil the ocean to get a lovely cup of tea.