I'm not "All In on AI" at all. I'm still quite skeptical about the current LLM-based AI assistant hype. Of course, I'm still using AI, despite its pros and cons and its supposed enormous waste of energy, privacy issues, bias, and hallucination.
But we definitely "need to talk about "Vibe Coding"", as Giorgi Kobaidze nails it in his DEV post (I'm All In on AI, But We Need to Talk About Vibe Coding), stating important hacker culture aspects like "journey is more important than destination", and why we don't want to go back to the not so good old times when StackOverflow was the go-to place to copy and paste.
Credits and disclaimer: thanks to Hunor Márton and React Berlin! Hunor Márton is the one talking about Astro in the middle of my cover image collage, but the person on the right is me, working with my laptop some years ago in a sunny kitchen in Düsseldorf. Some people might remember the green wall that was mistaken for an artificial background before Zoom and Teams were able to do that properly.
Thanks to Giorgi for his post!
I want to keep the good old times of DEV, although I suspect they only exist in your mind when you discover a good post to read or get into the flow of writing.
Where is the Vibe in Vibe Coding?
There is no vibe in "vibe coding". The hype got it all wrong! Coding and hacker culture, as we said, was all about a journey of learning, experience and inspiration. Developers configure their editor themes and keyboard shortcuts, set up their desk (or deliberately decide not to, if they prefer working as "digital nomads") and compile playlists of music to "get into the zone" or flow of concentration and inspiration.
This vibe of coding could have be known as vibe coding.
Being "lazy" in a positive way, taking time to explore.
Productive Procrastination.
Not running faster in the wrong direction.
Monday Morning DEV Vibes
DEV, also known as DEV.to or The Pragmatic Developer, is good for exchanging ideas and experience with fellow developers. It's quite inclusive and features content from beginner to expert level, despite its ongoing spam and slop content issues, that they are now trying to fight with the help of Google's AI, if I understand correctly. I got quite upset when I first learned about their new collaboration, as Google has been infamous for dropping their initial "don't be evil" motto and DEI programs and failing to listen to their critical former employees like Joy Buolamwini.
It's posts like Giorgi's that keep bringing me back to DEV, and some "Monday Morning" vibes posted when it's already Monday afternoon in Europe.
DEV's Meme Monday posts already featured many memes and jokes on "vibe coding" and there will be more if this madness continues.
What happened to DEV's Music Monday?
Besides DEV's Meme Monday series, there used to be occasional Music Monday threads. Is the music subject already exhausted? Not for me, anyway. I have been fine-tuning my retro digital sound sets "more fun to compute" and Commodore Night Shift in the Rain with vintage synth classics from Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock, and Jean-Michel Jarre's endless synthesizer soft pop to new retro remixes and techno tunes by LukHash and other contemporary artists. I curated several different playlists on Spotify, mostly for my own entertainment, but also some shared music lists to play at events and parties, or to help expacts learn German or Turkish by listening to music and trying to make sense of the lyrics.
Here is my new "Astro Black Coding Vibes" playlist.
AI-Assisted Astro and React Revival
Yesterday, I started a new playlist for my Phoenix-from-the-ashes-ish repurposed bookstack side project which has become an AI-Assisted Astro and React Revival showdev demo and work-in-progress learning project. You can find a link and a screenshot further below.
But first, let me share some of my temporary takeaways of the state of AI-assisted coding, after evaluating Windsurf and Cursor for less than 1 day, comparing Gemini, ChatGPT, le Chat, and Perplexity for search engine marketing and code creation, and discussing my AI tools experience with fellow developers.
AI is more valuable the less you know
Like a one-eyed leading the blind, despite hallucinations and outdated information, rough topical overviews and faulty initial boilerplate code can still speed up getting started with a new tech stack, framework or programming language, even more so if you didn't study computer science and don't have much coding experience yet.
Ask, ask, and keep asking!
Again and again, ask and keep asking! Maybe it's in the nature of human communication mimicked by large language models, or its a specific fault of today's tools, but chat interfaces like ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Claude, or JetBrains AI share one common shortcoming: they won't tell you everything at once.
Always assume that the AI will misunderstand your question or have a diametrically different understanding of an unmentioned aspect that you took for granted! Don't trust its memory or consistency. Don't expect it to use the given context and follow all aspects of your instructions. Treat it like a human assistant on drugs who might be helpful and inspirational but don't hand them your purse to make a crucial purchase that your business relies on.
Prefer Specific Tools
I don't know if that's even "AI", but natural language tools and services like Grammarly, deepL Write, and Google Translate have become part of my writing and review process, although I don't always use their suggestions and prefer to make my own mistakes and show my personality and my overcomplicated "German English" from time to time. Use a refactoring tool to refactor. Use a linter to lint.
Don't believe the hype, especially as a Senior
As I said, AIs provide less value the more you already know. As a senior developer, it might be easier and faster to read the documentation and fill in the blanks in your mind and verify assumptions with a quick proof-of-concept code, instead of wasting time begging a chatbot to provide you with complete and correct information.
AI Chatbots Past their Peak, AI Assistants Breaking Working Code
Some more specific, subjective, observations using AI tools in the past days:
Everybody is talking about Claude these days. But Claude keeps crashing its browser process and hogging my CPU probably trying to use local resources, which is a good idea only when the local machine is optimized for heavy computations with gaming (GPU) or Tensor (TPU) hardware, but not if it's a lightweight laptop. Conclusion: I can't use Claude.
Mistral did a nice word play with its Le Chat literally meaning "the cat" in French, but it also speaks English and German, and I couldn't tell it apart from ChatGPT and Gemini. Another chat-based AI service, another alternative if the other ones don't work well for any reason.
Perplexity is another alternative that I couldn't discern from the others (yet).
Of several new VSCode forks with integrated AI, Windsurf did a great job, at least at first sight, of an AI-focused IDE. But Windsurf failed to generate correct code and repeatedly broke working code contradicting explicit instructions. Conclusion: I uninstalled Windsurf after trying it for less than 1 working day and after manually fixing or reverting several of its contributions.
Things can always get worse. Cursor did not support Astro out of the box when manually editing
.astrofiles in the editor, offered no helpful auto-completion and did not indent the HTML markup. Cursor AI chat initially did not work due to alleged suspicious activity of my account. Trying to work around by connecting my GitHub account, the Cursor app requests unnecessarily high permission including write access to selected or all of my GitHub repositories. A shady first impression, and no added value.Long time ago, I had ditched Copilot, AI's advance guard, after a cursory evaluation shortly after its initial release, and despite having a GitHub and a Microsoft account, I didn't have the official VS Code editor installed but the open-source-focused VS Codium which lacked Copilot integration. Conclusion: I should install VS Code and give Copilot another chance.
JetBrains AI: not unhelpful, but seems to lack context and permissions beyond context menu actions, failing to read ESLint output in the integrated terminal and refusing to run or simulate eslint against the code in my open editors. But I don't need AI to use a linter, and maybe it's the right decision to restrict AI assistant's permissions and focus on stability and maintaining non-AI editor features that already work. PhpStorm also offers quick and helpful line-based code completion with great accuracy and its attempts at completing natural language can distract, inspire, and only occasionally save some keystrokes. JetbrainsAI can answer a broad range of questions reducing the need to open a web browser and risk getting distracted and procrastinate. Its communication style sounds way too much like OpenAI's chatGPT in my opinion.
ChatGPT got more verbose and chit-chatty, overusing emojis and ending every answer with a cliffhanger call-to-action paragraph offering its further assistance any time in the future, and I suspect that it withholds important aspects of its answers on purpose, to make the users insist, come back, and develop addictive behavior. As OpenAI seems on its ways to becoming a commercial company, they need to convert casual users to paying customers or at least increase the time spend with their services so that they can show them ads or promoted content in the near future. Conclusion: ChatGPT has already passed its peak. Maybe it's not the only one.
Google Gemini, on the other hand, is still struggling to keep up with ChatGPT and various other alternatives, so they're currently offering much value for free. And, as search experts and a company with a large code-centric developer community, they know a lot about coding. Gemini won my evaluation so far, as it generated correct code and helpful hints just with some text prompts in a browser-based chat session, without requiring any additional context or software installation.
"Jengo Stone here, ..."
I had already forgot that I used it, when Gemini surprised me by recalling its made-up name of "Jengo Stone", my diligent and intelligent imaginary Kenyan-German half-brother, that I invented when trying out improved AI image generation features.
"Jengo Stone here, ready to tackle this!" was Gemini's reminder that it was still aware of my initial prompt.
Bringing Back the Vibe and Productivity
Productivity to me means avoiding unnecessary struggle and distraction without cutting out challenge and inspiration.
To bring back the vibe, I terminated my Cursor and Windsurf accounts and uninstalled their obsolete software, opened PhpStorm again, ready to dive into Tutorial hell and listen to Hunor Márton Borbély´s "Astro (... Markdown, Remark)" talk on YouTube released by the React Berlin Meetup team, and play back my new "Astro Black Coding Vibes" playlist on Spotify simultaneously, with Freedom Satellite's "Astro Black", Astro's "Astro", and several songs called "React" and "Playwright", before getting back to coding with Gemini and Jetbrains AI.
That's the right kind of "vibe coding" for me!
Top comments (2)
Great post! And thanks for referencing my article, appreciate that!
Thanks! Glad you like it, although I think yours is the better article.
I have made several amendments to mine, correcting typos and adding credits and a disclaimer so that nobody mistakes me for the real Hunor Márton or the imaginary Jengo Stone.