Bad Vibes?
I don't tend to chase technology trends but I do like trying out new technology as it becomes available to see if I can find interesting new ways of solving problems or new possibilities.
When GitHub's Copilot first became available for preview I tried it out. It was... fine. It was marginally better than semantic code completion but slower and tended to still spit out some other people's data intact. When I let it generate large chunks of code it often produced code that looked correct but was wrong in subtle ways. I had to spend a lot of time fixing the code it generated. Not that useful to me, I stopped paying close attention.
I was also concerned about the models being trained on code I own and license with specific restrictions.
New Vibes?
In the past year or so I've heard that models and the tooling around them have improved. Instead of just having OpenAI's model via GitHub in VSCode, Google's and Anthropic's models are available through a variety of tools and integrations. I've been playing with the web interfaces to Gemini Canvas and Claude Artifacts, the claude code command-line tool, aider with Gemini and Claude models, VSCode with Gemini Code Assist, and replit's Claude-based environment.
I have an idea for an application that does music playback along with some DSP and other tricks. I spite of my hopes it seems to make the most sense to build this in C++. I tried using this bevy of new tools to help me and while tools like Claude Artifacts let me play with mock-ups of a React web interfaces, once I started trying to get multithreaded C++ code written everything struggled. Fair enough I guess - I struggle at that too.
Good Vibes?
I've had this web site rewrite kicking around for a while and so I thought maybe this is a more conventional project to get some LLM help with.
I asked for some help spicing up the visual design. It's... fine...
With sufficiently specific prompting I found it's been able to tweak and extend the scripts I've written to maintain the site. It's mostly succeeded at tasks like adding RSS feed generation, which aren't that complex, but which I'd have to go and read a bit about.
A this point I'm mostly using the Replit UI because it's ironically a more integrated experience than I've managed to pull off with other tools.