AI has blown my mind.
It’s true. 2 years ago I was a luddite, lost and alone.
Today, however, I embrace vibe-coding like nothing ever before. And I WILL call it ‘vibe-coding’ and I know it sounds derogatory, but you have to consider the fact that I learned how to program when the internet was not even ‘a thing’ - so I have honed my skills for decades. And I’m working on my fourth STEM degree.
Therefore, and appropriately self-servingly, new vibe-coders will never command the respect that I have for people who started coding in the pre-internet era and have deep academic computing understanding.
Anyway, with that out of the way. I fully 100% embrace the vibe-coding promise, as it has shown consistent results in allowing me to deliver better working systems faster.
I cannot say that everyone will have the same experience. They might do, I just can’t speak for them. My toolkit is currently:
- Perplexity.ai - My ‘daily driver’. - I have a ‘Pro’ sub. I use it primarily for research, but also for ‘first pass’ attempts at coding projects and architecture. It uses a bunch of cutting-edge frontier models under the hood. I use ‘computer’ and ‘orchestrator’ by topping it up with credits, although I try not to overspend.
- NotebookLM - For learning. ummarising books, documents, research papers, and for creating multi-format multi-modal learning resources so I can ‘overlearn’ concepts and facts from different angles. I also ask it research questions and perform literature reviews over multiple documents. I have a Google Workplace subscription that gives me ‘Pro’ access.
- Deepseek v4 + ‘Aider ’ - for the majority of coding. I have not moved over to fully Agentic AI software development, and Claude is far too expensive for a poor student like me, so I use Deepseek. It does most things I want so far.
- Gaming PC with Nvidia 4070 + ollama + Qwen 3.5 Code + vim-ollama - as a replacement for Github Copilot.. why spend money when you can self-host? I will be updating this choice this as models become more optimised for gaming PCs and more available.
My coding environment is Vim, and it will never change. Anything you can do, I can do in Vim, it’s just more likely that I don’t want to. Check out vWorkbench if you’re interested in seeing my Vim dev environment.