The uninitiated might be wondering, what is “vibe-coding?” So here is a short-ish, very much not AI answer.
Tell AI to make an app, bammm, it’s there and it works.
To be very fair though, there is no one definition that everyone can agree on but the basic premise is that AI is doing most, if not all of the coding, and you are just there, facilitating.
So I tried it. I tried to vibe-code. And I have thoughts.
There are things it is, and things it isn’t
I was at a games night, and we’d played 30 seconds to its max and wanted something to switch things up. Charades we thought. Went on the app store and downloaded an app clearly written “Charades”. Great then. More fun on the way.
Except that we knew none of the things that were in the game, completely. And as self-ordained problem solver, I took it upon myself to make a charades game that Africans, in particular Zimbabweans, can play and relate to.
Gave myself a weekend because it’s really a simple application if you think about it. But I was like nah, there’s AI for this.
So I opened VSCode and told it what I want and kept on prompting it until it said it was done with everything.
Yeppie! The app is done. With the excitement that a child has when its mother comes back from work, I installed it on my phone.
Crashed.
I really thought the promise of vibe-coding was that it’d do everything “better than humans” but when I opened the code, even spaghetti isn’t as tangled and messy as that horror show of code I saw.
And I learnt that my passion career is still safe for a few years, I hope…
I should mention, if you want the app I then fixed after it was vibe-coded, here is a link … which should be here had Google Play approved the app in time but oh well, I will post it on my socials.
Lessons
1. Context is key
AI is like an overzealous child that wants to use a knife to eat Cerevita. Because of how LLMs work, if you don’t guide it accordingly, you will find it doing the wildest things ever. And that’s something that is not talked about enough.
The reason is that Sam Altman and the likes promise us that AI means autonomy, but in practice, it means me learning to become a supervisor and that really takes a paradigm shift in mindset, in how one works and in one’s coding practices.
2. Gemini is a horror show.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
3. AI won’t replace programmers, it will make us work faster… for now
Genuinely convinced that companies that are laying off people because of AI will come to regret it soon because AI isn’t all it’s been made up to be. It’s really not autonomous. Needs a lot of human supervision to guide
And that’s really the conclusion… That vibe-coding really isn’t a “thing” if you think you can tell AI to make the next WhatsApp in 2 hours. You will be very disappointed.
But it will certainly make you faster.
