Thomas Dohmke

The challenge that most engineers have, and this is where vibe coding comes, is that you have an idea and you want to build something on a Sunday morning.

And the first thing you did in the past is you started research and you maybe looked on GitHub for some open source components or you looked on maybe something project already existed that you could fork.

But before you knew it, it was night and you had maybe done a little bit, got a quick prototype done, but you were nowhere near the thing you actually wanted to build.

Maybe you got to 10% or 5% and you realize that what you thought is easy to do is actually much more complex.

And

That has dramatically changed through the use of open source, through the cloud, through platforms like GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, all these being available to you.

Because when I started coding in the early 90s, it was books and magazines.

And then on a Commodore 64, I had to build it all from scratch.

So we are already at the point where we are taking pieces and we're composing software.

But now I open my editor and my project is there and I can just ask Copilot, what's the next step?

Or I can give agent mode the feature I want to build and say, hey, help me to build this feature.

And then it looks through the files and it identifies where I have to make changes.

So I don't even have to figure that out myself.

We are in the code base.

We have to implement things.

It runs command.

And the cool thing when it runs command, it actually can look at the error message.

and then see what is wrong on my system and it might have to install another library and things like that.

So it keeps you more in that flow state, you know, instead of you switching back and forth between research mode and trying to make things work and then things take forever to compile.

In the meantime, you go and make a coffee or get distracted by Substack.