Vibe coding and meeting notes from 19th March 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On 19th March, fourteen freelancers and business owners got together in the Lord Nelson Inn, Brighton, to talk all things freelancing and tech. This is some of what we talked about:
- i360 reopens and is £5 for Brighton residents
- “Vibe coding” and being hacked
- Will your job be replaced by AI, or will it be made more secure by AI?
- Travel in Japan
- Living outside Brighton for space
- Eric Drass on AI & the artist at Creative Tech Meetup
- Mutual project catch up
- Tesla share price drop
- Handling data lakes
- House prices and house building
- Parent care
- The number of men reading has dropped
- Using AI effectively and its fallibilities
- Typo3 CMS
Vibe coding
A new slang term has hit the tech industry recently: ‘Vibe coding.’ This is prompting an AI/LLM tool to get code and using it in your project without really thinking about it. Making a project as quickly and easily as possible, getting the AI to do the work for you.
Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I’m not against ‘vibe coding’ your way into a tool or personal project. What I will say is… don’t just put it live on the internet.
Something that is perfectly serviceable for you to use on your own computer is not always safe to put online. You need to worry about people being able to control your database through your site code, or be able to upload whatever they want onto your server.
It is very easy to have an old project created by an experienced programmer have problems due to a mistake or an old library for something that was standard to use at the time you created the project. When you use an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude to write code for you, you are having old code created as they have been trained on lots and lots of old code. So they will use libraries (other people’s code that lots of people use as it’s helpful) that are out of date, because the libraries were current when the code and articles they were trained on were written.
If you want to knock something up to make your life easier, go for it!
If you want to knock something up and put it live on the internet for everyone to use, don’t! Get some help from a programmer first, or if you are a programmer, have a think about what problems there might be and adjust the code around them. Don’t turn a fun, quick project into a maintenance nightmare for yourself.
Or, you know, do, then hire a freelancer programmer to sort out all the problems.