Vibe-Coding is a mood.
Things change FAST in the vibe-coding world.
Last time I posted here on the subject, I was using the ‘Zed’ vibe coding editor . This was only a month or so ago!
Agent Harness
Today, my current setup is using the ‘Pi’ commandline agentic harness with Deepseek-Flash-v4.
Model Choice
Deepseek is currently the ‘best value’ coding model for me, I constantly check which is the current ‘best value’ model with a view to switching to it, but it’s been Deepseek for a while now. I am a poor student and cannot afford Claude.
Process
The process I use is roughly the same - emphasise that the agent builds comprehensive tests, and RUNS them on every iteration and fixes any bugs arising from them, as well as keeping full documentation updated - Mermaid diagrams and comprehensive technical architecture markdown documents, so I can make sure it is building roughly the right thing.
It definitely helps that I have 20 years of software engineering experience - this gives me a strong idea of what what I WANT to achieve looks like, just rarely do I enough have patience and time to build it.
With vibe-coding, things become substantially easier, and I am able to do things that I wouldn’t have dreamt of being able to achieve manually.
Choice of Projects
I have ‘steered away’ from projects with a commercial focus.. because damn it.. I’m on a career break paid for by myself.. so I should be working on projects which are directly useful to me, and FUN.. so what ACTUALLY gets built are projects related to my hobbies and interests, and also home network and HomeAssistant setup.
Also I’m currently a student at Imperial College London which takes up most of my ‘serious thinking time’.
The projects that I vibe-code therefore are usually not particularly ambitious, and are small self-contained scripts or applications that I can ‘chain together’ on the commandline of my Linux server, in line with the ‘NIX philosophy ’.
As a result they get built fast, easily and accurately.
Choice of Language
Anything I know quite well. Currently that includes Bash scripting (yes it is entirely possible to vibe-code good, well-structured, maintainable Bash!), Python and occasionally Go or something a bit more exotic.
Scale
I haven’t really focused too much on building a ’large’ vibe-coded project yet, plus everything that I do is ‘greenfield’. I assume that when these conditions change, and I work in a more traditional ‘software engineering’ way, I will have to rethink the process and assumptions and possibly also the tools I am using.
I still think that building a test framework and iterating to match that is THE BEST way to vibe code, and almost definitely becomes more and more vital the more complex your project is.