I gave 'Vibe Coding' a go, and was pretty impressed

A couple of days ago I decided to have a go at another side project after reading a thread on Reddit. Someone on r/BuyUK was asking about UK specific Gmail alternatives. From the responses it sounded like there wasn't really anything out there. Which piqued my interest.

I decided to have a go at creating my own UK-centric freemail provider. I wanted to throw together an MVP as quickly as possible, before it ended up as yet another half-finished side-project.

So that night I settled down with a fresh Laravel project, Copilot newly installed, and a ChatGPT tab open.

I'm familiar with ChatGPT, so I started there. My methodology is pretty basic - I asked ChatGPT to create a Blade template including content and then just pasted that into a file.

Next I gave Copilot a go. Now I didn't spend much time learning how to use it, so there's a good chance I wasn't using it properly. But I wasn't really blown away. The auto completion stuff was good some of the time, but after a while it felt like it just kept suggesting the same things that I didn't want. I also found the chat panel to be a bit cumbersome. All in all it didn't give me the existential dread I was expecting as a developer, which probably means I was using it wrong.

In the end I just stuck with using ChatGPT in a very basic way to copy and paste what I needed. This was partly because it was 2am and I didn't have the bandwidth to learn anything new. It still helped me to get a side-project MVP up and running in record time, before the momentum had slowed and apathy started setting in. I'll definitely be trying it again in future.