Vibecoding A Better World
AI may very well kill us all in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime it’s a magical tool that enables even near-idiots to perform near-miracles. While the Scottish Parliament has been off for the October half-term and nothing’s been happening in politics, I’ve been occupying myself with modifying some very old computer games.
(Click the pic to see what I’ve made this week.)
Now, I have close to zero coding skills, but I’ve been able to do it thanks to the wonder that is Claude. I’ve messed around with various AIs before, usually to clean up artwork of one sort or another (something at which Grok is extremely skilled), but Claude is operating on a whole different level.
A term has already emerged to describe what it does: “vibecoding”, meaning that you just type in the gist of what you’re trying to achieve and Claude does all the work for you and produces the finished article in minutes.
Now, that’s something of an exaggeration – the examples I’ve created myself have taken anything from a single prompt to half a day of chatting with the algorithmic auteur, but its talents do seem to have taken a dramatic leap forwards in the last month or so, resulting in an avalanche of new games, especially in the retro field.
(Typically you might until recently have seen one or two a day appearing, but I must have played 200 in the last fortnight alone.)
The bulk of them have been easily the equal of what might have taken a dedicated human coder months to produce, and on the strength of the last few days’ work I would without hesitation tell the current collection of clattering clownwits infesting Holyrood to not bother coming back from their holidays, and let the machines run the country.
Because we’ve got “vibe” politicians writing our code (legislation) anyway, and unlike their useless output, at least Claude’s works.
Fantastic!, you need to give Grok Bot a play too, not as smart as Claude (at the moment) but really good at automating almost anything. Booking the local dump has been a pain since the virus, if you don’t book before Friday all the weekend slots are gone. Now Grok Bot books me a slot on a Tuesday for the 4ish every Sunday, now I’m part of the problem 😉
Nice to see that you’ve had some fun for a change, Rev.