Links For the New Year
Reflections on Vibe Coding
I spent some time toward the end of last year experimenting with Claude Code, building a little project that I may still finish and release. A lot of other people had the same idea, and many of them shared their experiences before I had a chance to collect my thoughts. Steve Yegge’s Gas Town has been the one I’ve seen circulated the most, though to be honest, most of the attention I’ve seen it receive has been more about gawking than serious consideration.
This post from Jason Perlow called Adventures in Extreme Vibecoding came closest to my experience. I may post my own thoughts in more detail later, but I feel Perlow did a good job getting across the way it feels to start using these new tools. On one hand, you can get a new greenfield idea off the ground with remarkable quickness, and at times the tools deliver good results quite directly. But just as often, I was frustrated by misunderstandings and compounding errors.
The best approach seems to be to create frequent checkpoints and be ready to go back and start fresh as soon as the agent gets off track. Version control is not optional, even for little personal projects! Frequently throwing away work feels very counterintuitive when you’re used to treating programming effort as the most critical resource to optimize for. In the end, I have to think that the viability of coding with LLM-powered agents is going to depend a lot on how expensive they are. Repeated experimentation and frequent false starts only work as long as costs remain low, which makes me wary of how long this approach will make sense.
More Web Games
- Word Grid is a clever game that feels inspired by the Immaculate Grid genre of sports trivia. The goal is to fill a word into each square of the 3x3 grid that meets the criteria specified for each row and column. The rarer your word, the better your score.
- Chains is a neat word association game that doesn’t seem to be updated every day, but the puzzles that have been posted so far have been enjoyable.
Web Oddity
I love little odd projects like this one, which scrambles and then uses bubblesort to reassemble the Amen Break.
Musical Interlude
I’ve had this R.E.M. song stuck in my head lately. It says something great about R.E.M. and sad about the state of the world that a 34-year-old political song is still so relevant today.