My Vibe Coding Experience

My Background

For context, I can't code. I've tried to learn several times, but I've never had the time (or patience) to really get under the skin of a language. That said, I do have strong technical competence and decades of experience in tech, so I'm not coming at this completely cold.

My Tools

My tools of choice have been Lovable and Cursor, with a sprinkling of Supabase and, more recently, some Cloudflare tools. I am not sure the last two quite meet the vibe coding level but they are very useful.

What I've Built

My first foray was a customer application for viewing video analytics outputs, it turned into a powerful live demo with secure authentication. All created for about $5 of Lovable credits. All very impressive.

I then went on to build a number of websites and various apps for telecom services including a router provisioning tool for @S-IMSY customers. Most recently I built my own SMPP client (if you know, you know). It's still in testing, not yet production ready, but it's coming along.

My Observations and Tips

1. These tools can seriously accelerate your learning, especially if you're like me and uninspired by "Hello World" tutorials. Vibe coding gives you something real to work on, and that helps me stay motivated.
2. Lovable is impressive. It produces clean output and gives you that dopamine hit of "I built something!" – but it only gets you so far. You still need to understand what it's doing and why.
3. Supabase is powerful, especially for authentication, edge functions, webhooks and APIs; but it demands some proper technical understanding.
4. Cursor is a very different beast, one I struggled with at first. But after a few hours of videos, I dived in. It's powerful but can easily go wrong if you're not careful. Think 'fast car with a dodgy sat nav'.
5. Always build with a plan. My top tip is to keep a demand log. You'll burn through credits quickly if you don't. Understand what features are key and which are just polish. Otherwise, you'll be topping up your credits mid-way through a key task.
6. Don't trust the AI blindly. It's a developer, a fast one, but one that doesn't understand what you're trying to build. Always check what it's doing, and never assume it's got it right.
7. Test and save frequently. You can get into a mess very quickly if you don't work in iterations you understand.
8. If it's not working – stop. Take a breath, research, and figure it out. AI can act with great confidence, but it might be confidently wrong.