Vibe-Coding

When I volunteered at Coderdojo, we taught kids to code. In 80% of the cases, that meant building video games with Scratch. While that is cool, the coaches got really excited when a child wanted to do something more exotic. Unity, robotics, or even just JavaScript. Finally, something they could also sink their tech teeth into! I remember a girl who wanted to build a robot. The volunteers got fired up. We brought Arduino kits and soldering material. We wanted children to short-circuit and burn LED lights to teach them how electronics worked. Quite a few of them did. ...

There’s a world of difference between Andrej Karpathy’s vibe coding and the kind you’d see from most product managers. The former understands what the machine is doing under the hood. The latter talks about specs without understanding the inner workings of the product increment. A better name for that workflow would be “blind vibe coding”. It’s hard to overstate just how different non-techies talk to their Cursor agent. From the original prompt to the intermediate feedback, a technical background makes everything easier, more informed and better. It’s tough to put myself in the shoes of those who lack those technical chops. ...

Rock climbing is one of my favourite ways to blow off steam. Whenever I tell people about that hobby, I get a common response: “Sounds really cool, but I could never do that because of my fear of heights…” Fear of heights is real, and it’s something we all have. In order to climb, we need to conquer that fear. And the only way to conquer that fear is… to climb. ...

LLMs are productivity multipliers for software engineers. Over the last few years, the quality of their output has reached a professional level. They cannot one-shot a complete SaaS product (yet), but it’s more than just fancy autocomplete. What used to take an hour now takes minutes. Once you get used to building with AI-powered tools, the alternative feels awkward. I remember developing software in the early 2000s. The internet existed, but treasure troves like Stack Overflow didn’t. Building something with a new framework meant buying and reading the physical book. Before hoodies were in, the sign of the real developer was a stack of O’Reilly books on your desk. ...