The Brief: Vibe coding back when it was cool 🤓
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In this issue of The Brief:
Vibe coding back when it was cool
Job opportunities
Things to watch, read, and explore
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Vibe coding back when it was cool
by Eli Woolery
I grew up with three younger brothers, and we loved building things. Living in the countryside during the relatively unsupervised 1980s, these things included poorly constructed tree forts built in the local valley oaks, “ninja stars” made from electrical tape and 12d nails, and bows with arrows fletched with blue jay or flicker feathers we found around our property.
We also built less hazardous things, like the generic “space” and “castle” LEGO sets that pre-dated the branded kits that I now build with my son (and daughter when she was younger). And we were early users of personal computers, from the TRS-80 with a tape drive that would take 5 minutes to load a simple BASIC program, to the Commodore 64 that we often had to “hack” via the command line interface to get a game to work—and often the hacking ended up being more fun than the game itself.
As we entered adulthood, our careers continued to follow our love of building. I started my career in physical product design, and my younger two brothers became software developers.
When my career pivoted into digital product design, I would often lean on my brothers for help when building side projects or apps. They were generous with their time, but both have families and careers of their own so it was an inherently limited resource.
But around two years ago that began to change.
Vibe coding before it was a thing
I definitely wasn’t one of the earliest adopters of vibe coding, though I hope to tell my grandchildren, in a curmudgeonly way, that I vibe-coded before the term was coined early in 2025, when it was still cool.
It started in 2023 with little apps…I wanted to make a calendar plugin that would track my hours on a consulting project via Google Calendar. And it still started with my brothers, usually with a DM on our family Slack:
“Hey Hart, if I wanted to make this calendar tracking app, what platform should I use?”
“Try Google Apps Scripts.”
And with a little help from ChatGPT, and a few round of debugging, I built the tracker: a Google Apps Script, plus some basic CSS for styling.
And I continued from there, sometimes work related (Design Better Radio), sometimes trivial side projects like a Rick Rubin “synthesizer.”
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