On Saturday I bought the book Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge (ISBN: 978-1966280026) at Books-A-Million. Vibe coding is essentially just AI assisted coding. I’m excited by this technology because it allows me to turn my brilliant ideas into applications even when I don’t know exactly how to code something. It is ideal for small projects which should be simple. Unfortunately small projects are rarely simple because there is always a technical hitch and you can spend hours finding the solution. This sort of thing has always stymied my side projects. Now AI can instantly suggest a solution for the problem that is blocking my progress. In a single weekend I can turn a brilliant idea into what I had envisioned. I am never lacking for inspiration so I have hundreds of brilliant ideas. Usually I do nothing with these ideas because I don’t have the time to pursue them and I know something will turn up to consume hours in a struggle with the code. But once that is no longer a problem there should be nothing stopping me.
The ideal side project should be modest. You don’t want to build an app like a startup would be trying to build for hundreds of thousands of users. A small project is more practical and there are many things that you can create without it becoming a major project. For example, plugins and browser extensions can be pretty simple . They require little actual code but they may get very technical. That is where AI comes in. It can handle all the technical aspects. For now, I am focusing on WordPress plugins. I am copying all of the material from the WordPress Plugin Handbook into my notes. I have also turned one of my ideas for a plugin into a demonstration plugin with the assistance of AI. There seems to be a lot of potential here. Just now I was searching for a WordPress plugin to embed a Goodreads widget into this blog post but I could not find one which works.
In addition to plugins and browser extensions, there are small utility applications which can be created. These don’t have to offer every feature imaginable. All you need is a tool which works a little better than what people are using.
