Vibe coding for fun and profit

Or How I learned to stop worrying and love the clankers

Chris Beeley

Sep 24, 2026

What is vibe coding not

  • Vibe coding is not using AI as part of a software development workflow
  • Software engineers and data scientists use a lot, a little, or no AI in their work
  • The important difference is they design, read, and check the code

What is vibe coding?

  • Writing code in natural language
  • Karpathy described it “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”

My experience with vibe coding

  • I’ve never used AI to write code at work because it wasn’t good enough at that time
  • But I have started to use it for a couple of things for myself
  • I started with what I would call “vibe-lite coding”
  • It was so successful that I went full vibe for the next project

Vibe-lite coding

  • I have elevated skin cancer risk so I’m obsessed with the UV index
  • I don’t trust the clouds!
  • So I built this with my own two brain cells
Graph showing UV index per hour

Next steps

  • It’s pretty ugly and hard to read so I fed the whole thing into AI
  • I asked me to help me see the individual time points as well as tidy up the scale
  • I also asked it to add a date
  • Now it’s much easier to read

What’s the scoreline people vs clankers?

  • I did the groundwork here
    • Set up the API call and drew the graph
  • AI helped with a daily refresh of the graph (team effort)
  • The formatting and adding a date to the page was all clanker
  • I did the copying and pasting into the RStudio window, and I did all the git commits

Could anybody do this?

  • I’m not really sure
  • I did a lot of faffing around with environment variables, APIs, and deployments
  • I’d love to go back to the beginning of this project and see if the AI could do it with no help
  • Do tell me what you think at the end

Real vibe coding

  • Inspired, I tried real vibe coding
  • Let’s have a look at the end product first

The tools of real vibe coding

  • Agentic AI
  • You type in a little box to the right and the agent changes the code
  • Let’s have a look at that now

People vs clankers scoreline again

  • I didn’t write any of the code for this one
  • I did set up the GitHub repository and using Git is vital IMO
  • I pressed a few buttons to deploy it onto GitHub
  • I did manually record all the sound and fix all the filenames
  • And let’s go back and look at the AI and the mistake it made after prompting

A note on real vibe coding

  • Doing it properly requires multiple agents
  • You get the AI to write a plan, then you approve the plan
  • Bots to write, bots to review, bots to test, bots to deploy
  • I haven’t done this and don’t need to for my stupid stuff
  • But that’s what you need to get the best results

Vibe codez 4 life

  • I need stupid web apps in my life
  • I know lots of people are doing this all over the world now
  • Give it a try

Caveats

  • I do (slightly) know what I’m doing
  • I know what’s possible
  • I can fix silly problems more easily myself than I can explain them to an AI

Go on Chris, talk about work at the end

  • Nobody wants a vibe coded OpenPlan
  • On the whole I think it’s managers, not devs, pushing AI tools
  • But I have an open mind about how vibe coding could be used at work more

How it might be used

  • I know some in my team are interested in using it e.g. to try a different technology
    • “Robot, convert this Shiny to JavaScript”
  • And I do wonder if vibe coding could help non technical people throw something on a screen for a conversation
  • But I don’t know, interested in opinions