February 19, 2026
Vibe Coding
You’re probably familiar with the term “vibe coding”, but just in case you’re not:
Vibe coding is a software development approach, coined by Andrej Karpathy in 2025, where users build applications by describing what they want in natural language to AI tools, focusing on the “vibe” or high-level functionality rather than writing syntax.
As an aging software developer and active AI user, I’ve toyed around with vibe coding a couple of times in the past twelve months or so.
The results were mediocre until two weeks ago, when I successfully vibe coded a read-only Slack app in twenty minutes.
For my next trick, I decided to have Codex figure out a way to add a search feature to my website.
Here’s the prompt I started with:
The attached project folder contains the source code and data for my website. There’s a folder in it named
dailythat has about 3500 markdown files in it. They are articles I sent to my mailing list, which I also archive as blog posts. Currently, they are listed on my site only in chronological order. I would like to develop a way for website visitors to find collections of articles that are useful for whatever situation they’re facing. For example, a user might say, “How do I get more leads for my dev shop?” and my website would present a short collection of the best articles that would help. I don’t want you to edit or move anything in the project yet. Just give me your thoughts on how it might work.
Ninety minutes later, this was live on my website:
Give it a try and PLMK what you think. I’ll share your feedback with Codex to have it improve the functionality.
(Aside for the devs in the audience: It figured out a way to make the search totally static! There’s no database, no API calls. Purely frontend javascript. It’s bonkers!)
Yours,
—J