Vibe coding software for one

What’s so great about vibe coding? I’ve been trying out tools like v0 and lovable, here’s my thoughts and some experiments I've made.

TL;DR Vibe coding encourages faster making and will facilitate a more creative (and weird!) digital landscape

Lowering barriers to making

These tools help reduce the gap between having an idea and making something. Without the need for extensive documentation to communicate an idea, the pure thought (minimum viable design?) can be inputted. The tool will fill in the blanks, join things up and the making process will help guide what comes next. Instead of being in a theoretical planning mode, it’s satisfying to be working in editing mode on a real thing.

Spirograph drawing app

Getting weird

I agree with something that Kevin Roose said on the hard fork podcast:

“What I think is so fun and interesting about this genre of coding project is you can really just build what I call software for one”

Vibe coding tools are making it easy to create esoteric and quirky digital experiences that can be as niche as your imagination can make them. It might be time for digital products to get weird again.

Personalised music recommender

Building experiences using the real world

These tools don’t sit in isolation on your desktop – they’re ‘alive’ in your browser and have access to all the things you think an AI should be able to see and know about. You can prototype with a wider spectrum of real inputs, APIs and devices. Do you want a website that only works on Fridays; an app that can look at you through your webcam; a tool built around open source weather data? Just ask the AI to plug it into your project and you’re prototyping with real data immediately.

Webcam waving tool

Having fun

As design has matured in recent years and found itself closer to the board room, it’s had to get more serious and naturally lost some of its silliness. Vibe coding encourages making things straight away and iterating; a side effect of that speed is that there’s a flippancy to these tools which can allow space for more fun, jokes and Easter eggs.

Design brief generator with limerick

🙏 Shout out to Mark Hale for pushing me to write things down!

Handmade: Slow TV —

Handmade is a series of three programmes from BBC Four that look at three master craftsmen and their processes. The key difference is that these programmes are slow. Very slow. As Director Ian Denyer explains: “The brief was brief: no words, no music, long, very long held shots I added my own restrictions – no shot less than ten seconds, and no movement of the camera.”

This makes for an unusual and absorbing hour and a half of TV. I find the pace, the craft, and the exclusive use of diegetic sound calming, cathartic and comforting. As someone who is something of a frustrated ‘maker’ I love watching people do what they’re good at. Seeing someone use a tool that they know so well that it’s a habit rather than a thought about action is thrilling and genuinely inspirational. (I get the same feeling of wanting to create things when I’m in Atlantis looking at sketchbooks and pens…)

Check all three out here.

The series blog is also worth a look for the voices of the craftspeople and an insight into how the series was made.

Mike Bracken & GDS —

I watched this talk from Mike Bracken about the Government Digital Service. He talks about how the processes and practices the GDS encourages can help reshape how government is delivered in the increasingly digital future.

On the purely practical level I think the GDS can make the business of government (i.e. living and working) more up-to-date and more politically progressive. On a current affairs note it could also be a way to facilitate budget cuts that not only keep ‘front-line’ services the same but actually improve them.

But more than that, I’m interested in the way the GDS does this. Mike Bracken contrasts the iterative, responsive, adaptable and ‘fail fast, fail cheap’ approach of the GDS to a ‘big bang’ style favoured by policy makers. I’m becoming more aware that successful projects seem to have this modular structure built into them. It means they can be added to later (as needs or budgets develop), moved in a different directions and also contribute to a coherent whole.

It’s not just government or design projects this can apply to – in analysing the things I like about my garden it’s this ‘ahem’ organic way of allowing things to happen and within certain boundaries not being too fussy. Later on you can check on what’s happened in the system or framework and make decisions from there. If it’s good - encourage it, if it’s bad, stop it and try something else. This sort of plan also allows for serendipity and responds to actual conditions rather than sticking rigidly to the plan you set out at the beginning..

I think I’ve fairly comprehensively mixed my metaphors here but I’m sticking with it. Gardening is good, setting up systems is good, and working iteratively, with cycles of critique and reflection is good.

January 2014 Photos

Christmas cards

Really enjoying getting back into the lino cutting. I find the whole process satisfyingly therapeutic. If you want one send me your address and I'll pop one in the post - but be quick not long till Christmas!

Bone Island

Part of an ongoing project looking at nature and the city. These are photographs of Queenhithe, AKA Bone Island. A beach opposite Tate Modern and The Globe on the Thames.

January 2011 Sketchbooks

Notes on The Delirious Musuem

I recently read The Delirious Museum by architect and exhibition designer Calum Storrie. Here's some of my favourite bits. ----

Introduction pg 3: Robert Venuri:

"I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non-sequitur and proclaim the duality. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer 'both-and' to 'either-or', black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white."

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pg 67: Samson by Chris Burden is a piece of art that pushes apart the gallery it's in as visitors enter through a turnstile.

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pg 138: This is Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, Italy. A building designed by Carlo Scarpa which houses the working plaster models for sculptures. The space is a very simple cube but has the corners removed and skylights/windows (Scarpa described them as 'fragments of sky') installed instead. I really like this deconstruction/dismantling of the gallery space.

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pg 151: The Museum of Unlimited Growth was designed by Le Corbusier in 1939. It attempts to solve the problem of a museum building which has an expanding collection (as most museums do). Visitors are directed through a channel in one side and arrive in the centre of the spiral structure from where they can explore the galleries and rooms. The museum can be expanding by adding more spiral over time. I love the idea of a never ending museum- a continuing process. Or even better one which is both complete (it is a complete building) and in process at the same time (it can be added to when needed).

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