I accidentally vibe coded a thing
My team has been struggling with questions like “what do we mean by X?” and disagreeing about what certain terms mean in the context our work. So on Friday i decided that the answer was to create a glossary of terms to give us a shared vocabulary,.
I made a list of some of the problematic terms and wrote down my understanding of what we meant by them. Next, as I increasingly do… I opened up copilot. I fed it my definitions and a few documents written by the team and asked it to start to compile my glossary for me.
It had a fairly decent first stab at it, and I was quite pleased with what came out. I started to think about presentation.
I’m not a big fan of static documents. There’s a big change going on in the department, so sharing documents in our team is a bit of a struggle at the moment (sharepoint migration, reorg etc.).
I wanted to improve the way it was presented, so I asked. Copilot if it could create an interactive searchable version, potentially something which could be used in “Loop“.
It’s a miracle
Before I realised what was happening, copilot bashed out a working React component.
It had all the terms. It had a search box.… It looked pretty good. I got carried away. I started to ask it to add additional features.
“Add a edit form so I can create and edit items”
“Make the definitions only appear when I click.”
“Move that element to the top of the page”, and so on…
Initially, it worked really well, and I was quite enjoying the outcome.
And then, as ineveitably happens with these sorts of things, Copilot had a wobble. It couldn’t complete writing the code, and so the app crashed. And then I got into a right pickle trying to recover it. I spent probably slightly longer than I should have trying to get it working again, before finding an older version was already saved, and I could recover it.
The next hurdle was actually trying to share it with the team.
And, this is where it all fell apart.
Unfortunately, office 365 tools is all restricted tied down, where I work, so it won’t run arbitrary code inside of Loop. So, while it was a nice idea, in the end, I had to fall back to just creating a document that we can share. Which is fine, but not quite what I had in mind.
My robot rubber duck
I used WordPress pretty extensively when it first came out, this blog has run on WordPress for over 2 decades, but when it came to building a new site for a side project recently, I found it had got difficult to navigate or know how to do the things I wanted.
This is largely a result of WordPress’ core strength. It’s an open platform, anyone can create plugins and themes for it, but the upshot of this is there are so many different ways to approach a problem that choosing where to start can feel like a bit of a minefield.
I’ve had an idea for something that I want to build for a very long time, I have had the domain name for over 7 years but never quite had the time or the drive to bring it to fruition. I started this year determined that this would be the year I made it happen.
I had some initial discussions with ChatGPT back in January, about what I wanted to achieve, and it gave me some pointers. Over the past few week, I’ve worked through, and around a number of limitations of WordPress, and my understanding of what’s achievable.
A big improvement in my workflow recently has been working in OpenAI’s Atlas browser. This has massively sped things up. Previously, I would have taken screenshots of problems and uploaded them into ChatGPT. Now, I can hit the “Ask ChatGPT” button and a new panel opens on the left. Chat can “see” what I’m working on and either direct me to the right settings in WordPress or talk me through adding plugins, PHP snippets, or whatever needs doing to get the job done.
I’m not fully into vibe coding, but when you’re working on your own, having a Rubber Duck that also has the power to search the web is incredibly useful.
I don’t use an AI copilot or Rubber Duck for every task, but there are more situations where, previously, I would have Googled something — or, in the olden days, searched Stack Overflow. AI is giving a faster, more context-aware answer.
It’s not replacing how I work… it’s just removing a lot of the friction.
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