In this post I will talk about the various vibe coding experiments I have done so far, and my key takeaways. I have written earlier about the AI FOMO. I was so overwhelmed earlier this year amidst feeling burnout and the AI FOMO. One day, I just decided to get through it. It must have been sometime in March, earlier this year.

Vibe Coding #1: Desktop Notifications on MacBook

I have a GitHub Copilot license, that I don’t use it as much. I wanted to try Cursor. I had this idea where I wanted to get desktop notifications to remind me to drink water or exercise. It was also trying to understand how to make desktop notifications work on MacBook. I started on the adventure. My memory is vague in terms of the exact prompts I tried, but the first one was a straight forward Cursor prompt detailing the problem statement I wanted to solve. Cursor setup a Python project scaffold and then started my next prompts. I had no clue about desktop notifications and I happened to blindly believe what Cursor was asking me to do. My brain went into being lazy.

I kept getting errors and was not able to run the code. After ~2 hours of lazy vibing, I took into my own hands. Now that I had spent 2 hours, I wanted to understand what’s going on or at least get a working spec. Within 30 minutes I was able to understand that in the newer versions of MacOS it isn’t straight forward to send desktop notifications via code unless at a system setting level. I then told Cursor about this fact and it told me the same. Almost ~3 hours into getting Cursor do what I could do easily the non-vibing way.

Takeaway: While the project scaffolding part was easy, there was too much of unnecessary back n forth which I could have saved that time had my brain not gotten lazy.

Vibe Coding #2: Telegram Notifications

I then asked Cursor what other options it could recommend instead of desktop notifications. These recommendations were great, one of them was to use Telegram. I really liked this part, and was able to setup a Telegram notification system in less than 30 minutes. I enjoyed learning about Telegram bots, and was quite impressed how developer friendly Telegram is. I now get notifications via Telegram and am very satisfied with this vibe-coding example.

Takeaway: Time very well saved. Traditional way would have taken me longer to setup this Telegram notification system.

I used the same example to scrape a real estate webpage and send Telegram notifications for matching keywords. This script runs everyday. I run this code in my DigitalOcean droplet and Cursor did the heavy uplifting here for me to help me setup this Python script remotely.

Other Examples

As the saying goes, things seem less overwhelming or complicated once you try them out. My experience too was similar. In fact I also realized what I did a year ago, to write custom WordPress plugin, in fact was vibe coding, even when the term itself did not exist. I was no longer overwhelmed. I went ahead and started a slack channel with my team to share vibe coding examples, and to share practical scenarios for everyone to try out.

I have then connected MCP servers with Claude, Slack, Zoom to get automated weekly team status reports, answer customer implementation questions on Slack, etc. As a Manager, this has given me huge ROI in me being able to get some other focus work done.

What AI experiments have you tried?