I've not had many successes with AI personally, after a while you give up and realize it's faster and easier to just RTFM, or make the design you wanted on your own in Photoshop, or quite literally anything. and if you don't know how to do those things, it's never too late to learn a new skill that will help you later in life. Thanks, Andrew Mattera
On Dec 12, 2025, at 15:14, Dave Shevett via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
This is a full on vibe coding experiment. I talk to it in english. Basically saying "Change the color of that prompt to blue" and "REfactor the authentication mechanism to use OAUTH" - you do have to treat it like a brilliant idiot with infinite patience. I went through about 20 iterations at one point chasing down a performance problem, asking quesitons and looking at timings until the AI figured out there was a looping problem on an AWS call that was iterating too many times. It fixed the code, timings were down to normal, and we pushed it into the production pipeline (it also helped set up a CI/CD pipeline via github actions).
One thing i found very helpful was i could ask it questions about hosting environments and other things, and it would help out with configuration issues (in my case with apache SSL certs), and walked through changes.
Is it perfect? Heck no. It makes mistakes, and occasionally goes completely against what i'm trying to do.
Now, going a little deeper - it's not like i started chatgpt and said "make an app" - i'm pulling on literal decades of developer and operational experience, so i know the pitfalls, i know all the false roads, and i know when a design track won't work (say, for scaling), so my experience is absolutely critical to making this successful. I designed the app, the data store, the metadata storage, the caching strategy. I just told Claude to do it in a certain way, and it did all the coding.
I'm actually enjoying it. And ended up with a cool app that i can come back to anytme and go "Okay, lets change this" without having to relearn the entire codebase everytime.
On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 2:21 PM Neil Cherry <ncherry@linuxha.com> wrote:
On 12/12/25 14:12, Dave Shevett wrote: The project I've been working on (and have talked with several folks in the forums about) is a site that handles people selling / giving away items. Think "A place other than ebay or craigslist").
This was 99% written using AI tools (Claude in Cursor to be specific)
https://claimit.stonekeep.com/ <https://claimit.stonekeep.com/>
We're currently using it in our community for people giving away / selling things locally, but I'm working on scaling it up so it can have 'areas' or 'communities' of items so we can share an infrastructure.
So, yeah, I guess i'm doing AI stuff :)
Cool, so is the AI usually close enough, or are you having to treat it like a JR Programmer?
How do you 'talk' to the AI?
-- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies KD2ZRQ