A couple of weeks back, I wrote about how coding happens on a spectrum whose opposite ends are:
- Vibe coding, a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, is where where developers use natural language prompts to have LLMs or LLM-based tools generate, debug, and iterate on code. Vibe coding is declarative, because you describe what you want.
- Grind coding, my term for traditional programming, where you specify how a program performs its tasks using a programming language. Grind coding is imperative, because you specify how the thing you want works.
I myself have been writing code for different purposes, on different parts of this spectrum (see the diagram at the top of this article for where they land on the spectrum):
- The Tampa Bay Tech Events utility: This is the Jupyter Notebook I use to gather event info from online listings and build the tables that make up the event listings I post every week here on Global Nerdy. I wrote the original code myself, but I’ve called on Claude to take the tedious stuff, including analyzing the obfuscated HTML in Meetup’s event pages to find the tags and classes containing event information.
- MCP server for my current client: This is a project that started before I joined, and was written using a code generation tool. The client is a big platform connected to some big organizations; my job is to be the human programmer in the loop.
- Picdump poster: Every week, I post “picdump” articles on the Global Nerdy and Accordion Guy blogs. Over the week, I save interesting or relevant images to specific folders, and the picdump poster utlity builds a blog post using those images. It’s a low-effort way for me to assemble some of my most-read blog posts, and it’s more vibe-coded than not, especially since I don’t specialize in building WordPress integrations.
- Copy as Markdown: Here’s an example of using vibe coding as a way to have custom software built on demand. I wanted a way to copy text from a web page, and then converting that copied text into Markdown format. This one was purely vibe-coded; I simply told Gemini what I wanted, and it not only generated the code for me, but also gave me instructions on how to install it.