Turns out there is a name for the thing I have been doing more and more over the past year. I have increasingly been turning to Gemini rather than Google when I am trying to work out how to write a little piece of code. Turns out this is called vibe coding.

Matt Webb had been talking about this in his lecture to our students at the start of the week (see his Thingscon talk for a similar narrative) and then stumbled upon this post on Bluesky about using LLM’s to help formulate the incantations for using ffmpeg. That latter script is something I will definitely be exploring for my bi-annual interactions with ffmpeg (and maybe also Sox…). Since things come in three’s the forces of serendipity then led me to a post by Matt Jones on vibe coding.

You could argue that my thinking out loud with Gemini and searching with google are the same thing, ultimately I am trying to find the code snippet that helps me syntactically form the code quicker than I can write it from scratch (since I don’t speak this language enough to speak it fluently). But it’s the interaction that I find different. The fact I can have a back and forth conversation. The fact I don’t have to know exactly what I want since that often emerges from the exchanges we have. For example, this week I needed to parse through a million or so rows of data from a recent experiment and add a new column to say which area of a floor plan that row was associated with. Turned out that bit of the code was really simple - once you saw it - and so the rest of the time was spent doing the plumbing to process all the data files. It also led me to writing a processing sketch to create a GUI to outline the 20ish area locations on the floorplans since it was quicker than outlining them manually.

The only thing am not sure about with vibe coding is the “user accepts code without full understanding” - am not sure about that - I think if you make a thing it is important to know how your thing works. Which also has implications for our teaching - where do we focus our time with our students, on teaching the fundamentals or teaching the tools.

In other news, Dr Santiago Martinez Balvanera passed his viva and a week of sun meant first social drinks in the nature smart garden, stopping for coffee on the way to work and some lovely sunny swims.