My brother Daniel sent an email to the family last Wednesday with the subject line “Proud Dad alert!” His daughter Sabrina had just built and launched a portfolio website from scratch. She didn’t use Squarespace or Wix. She built a custom Next.js site with scroll-triggered animations, a frosted glass navigation header, a custom image carousel with lightbox, and six page templates – all self-hosted on Netlify . ...
While “vibe coding” was a catchy phrase when I first heard it, something about it felt like a head fake to me. And, now that I’ve leveled up to “competent individual software developer” again (after 33 years of not writing any code) I think it’s the wrong phrase. Instead, I’d refer to what’s going on as AI Pair Programming. When I started playing around with AI-related coding tools last Christmas (because, well, I was bored), I had zero skills with contemporary software development. While I hadn’t written any production code since 1992, I played around with a new programming language every few years. Perl. Ruby. Ruby on Rails (sort of, not really). Python. Clojure. I could do Hello World and a few other simple things, but I never really got past basic CSS, tooling, or deployment stuff. I had a Github account and would futz around with it, but quickly get tired of trying to figure out why I didn’t care about a PR. And damn, so many CLI things. ...
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a CTO of a large, fast-growing public company. Well, I was a Quasi CTO in the same way the United States and the First French Republic had a Quasi War between 1798 and 1800 (basically, sort of a war; sort of a CTO … but not really.) As I rediscover my second love (my first love is Amy), I’ve relied on several mentors to help guide me. One of them is Michael Natkin , who has been helping me with Cursor in the background at a few key moments. ...
This played out on @bfeld on X , and I thought it was fun enough to replay it here for anyone who is struggling to get their minds around vibe coding and current AI tooling. If you are receiving this via email and the tweets/X’s aren’t showing, click through to the website as I’m still struggling to get Mailchimp working well after my hibernation. Perhaps it’s time to switch everything to WordPress… ...
Question: If you had limited experience with graphic design software but wanted to do basic stuff for web design, what software would you use? Leave the answers in the comments or email me. As I play around with Vibe coding, I’ve decided to take a new topic each week. For context, look at my Dinostroids: My Journey into Vibe Coding . Or just go play Dinostroids . This week, I’ve been learning how to modify WordPress themes. My website has a complex theme that is impossible to change without getting under the hood. The Foundry website is also excessively complex for what it is, but they both turn out to be great to learn on. ...
Dinostroids , my first vibe-coded software project, is live. The last time I wrote any meaningful amount of production software was in 1990. At the time, I was running a software consulting company with my partner, Dave Jilk. We’d reached the point where, as we grew, he became responsible for all the software, and I handled all the network integration stuff we had to do for our clients. Every now and then, I’d have to do maintenance on something I had written in the past, but it was pretty minimal. ...