Vibe coding has made programming fun for me aga...

Vibe coding has made programming fun for me again 🔮, and reconnected me with the eagerness to create.My sabbatical at SumUp started on January this year, which means that around Christmas time, I got myself an “assignment” to play with some of the coding assistants (Copilot and Cursor mainly).I took the chance to make some improvements on my website template (https://lnkd.in/dPz6DUS6), which is the open-source theme behind my own site (https://lnkd.in/dTv6XuT).

That way, I added support for some features I wanted to implement, such as dark mode, responsive improvements, etc.As I have been working more with both tools and different versions of the LLMs I have been refining the kind of prompts, and some intuition for where the process would end at a dead end.Before the code assistants, I could rarely find time to focus on coding and would often get sidetracked by dependency installing or who knows what. I found myself “talking” to the LLMs as if they were my rubber duck.

Jumping back and forth between the “product manager” and “senior developer” hats, polishing the product.Not only did I like this, I continued this during odd free hours during my parental leave earlier this year…I have been amazed by the competition between the IDEs (and the LLMs).

In a lapse of months, there have been improvements in agentic modes, visual input, or visual edition (like lovable does).Another thing that amazed me was that I tried earlier this year to program a small app for the Garmin SDK - and the suggestions were just terrible.

Months later, I’ve given it a new try and in a matter of hours I could craft a QR app for the smartwatches (https://lnkd.in/dwv4bKrp), paired with a simple Go backend (https://lnkd.in/dr_C6AZS).It's easy to make fun of “vibe coding” as “lame programming”, but to me it has been a chance to focus on “what” instead of “how”, as well as allowed me to program without the ability to allocate continuous hours for focus time (which are usually needed to make significant progress).And it has not only been fun, but valuable too: the theme I offer for free has considerably grown in usage. I consider Copilot & Cursor the “unnamed contributors” that accelerate every step I take to improve the code… and keep me motivated to do so.And I can also say that I’ve embraced vibe coding before it had a name, I’m an early adopter 😆#vibecoding #earlyadopter #agenticprogramming #aiassistedprogramming