A logo that was completely generated with AI, like everything else in the project. (Source: ChatGPT)

I don’t mind the term “vibe coding“, when used correctly. A lot of people (at least on Reddit) seem to think it means “any time you code with AI.” I prefer Andrej Karpathy’s original definition: ”

There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. […] I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects.

Emphasis mine.

That last bit is key. For throwaway weekend projects, vibe coding is this magical state where you have an idea but absolutely no desire to setup boilerplate, read API documentation, or even want to deal with the plumbing. You just want the thing to exist.

A few evenings ago, I decided to put in a serious vibe coding session using one of my favorite tools, Claude Code via SSH through Blink on my iPhone (!), to create a CLI utility to help manage the endless number of branches I have on my machine, all because of our huge monorepo.

For reasons I’m not entirely sure about, I decided to use Python. A language I know approximately nothing about beyond “white-space matters”, “there’s probably a library for that,” and “print("Hello, world!").”

(Hey, I’d have to turn in my software engineering badge if I didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel every so often)

So, picture this scenario: I’m staring at my terminal after I had just typed git branch. I’m looking at a screen with about 37 branches in various states of decay. And of course there are numerous unhelpful branches with names like, daves/no-jira/hotfix, daves/no-jira/hotfix-2, daves/no-jira/hackweek-project-cool. My terminal is just a wall of branch names, most of them mocking my organizational skills.

(By the way, what was hackweek-project-cool? I don’t know… I never committed any code to it!)

I needed a better way to manage this chaos. So naturally, instead of cleaning up my branches like a responsible developer, I decided to build a tool. In a language I don’t know. Using only Claude Code. What could possibly go wrong?

Claude Code is great. It never gets tired. It never gets angry. Even if I kept asking questions and piling more features on top.

• “Let’s make a shell script using Python to display Git branches.”
• “Ohhh, can we make it show which branches have uncommitted changes?”
• “Oh, oh! Add some colors, but tasteful colors…”
• “Hey, there are a lot of branches here. What if pressing shift + d deleted branches (but we should probably have a confirmation…)?”
• “You know what it really needs now? A loading spinner!”

After a few hours of asynchronous back and forth, we had a result! Git Branch Manager: a terminal UI that actually shows useful information at a glance. Navigate your branches with arrow keys, see visual indicators for everything important, and perform common operations without memorizing Git commands.

For me, those little indicators are game changers:

• * Current branch
• [modified] Has uncommitted changes
• [unpushed] Exists locally but not on remote
• [merged] Already merged (why is this still here?)
• ↓ Remote branch you haven’t checked out yet

One feature that I love: Smart stash management. When you try to switch branches with uncommitted changes, gbm asks if you want to stash them. But here’s the cool part: it remembers which stashes it created and gives you a notification when you switch back. Press ‘S’ and boom! Your changes are restored!

This process still blows my mind. I describe what I wanted in plain English, and Claude Code would translate these chaotic ideas into actual, working Python. “Make old branches look old” turned into color-coding based on commit age. “It should be smart about stashing” became an entire stash management system.

Installation is pretty simple, too. No pip, no dependencies, just curl and go:

# Quick install
sudo curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daveschumaker/gbm/main/git-branch-manager.py -o /usr/local/bin/git-bm
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/git-bm

# Additionally, add as a git alias
git config --global alias.bm '!git-bm'

Now you can just type git bm anywhere. Pretty neat!

There’s also browser integration (press b on any branch), worktree support, and a bunch of other features I’m proud of, err, creating, despite not having touched the code.

Here’s the thing about vibe coding with AI: it completely changes what’s possible for a weekend project. I built a legitimate, useful tool in a language I don’t know and using standard libraries I’d never heard of.

If you asked me 6 months ago if someone with no knowledge could build useful tools or websites using AI prompts only, I might have said no. “You still need people who understand software engineering principles, who understand what the code is doing,” I’d (not so) confidently say.

But now… it’s getting crazy. Is this the future of programming? To be a glorified conductor who oversees an orchestra of AI agents? Maybe!

Bottom line: my Git branches have never looked better, and I didn’t have to spend six months learning Python to make it happen! So, if you’re buried in branches like I was, give gbm a shot: github.com/daveschumaker/gbm

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go stare at my beautifully organized branch list again.

P.S. Yes, I realize I could have just cleaned up my branches manually in less time than it took to build this. But where’s the fun in that?

I’ve been playing around a lot with Ollama, an open source project that allows one to run LLMs locally on their machine. It’s been fun to mess around with. Some benefits: no rate-limits, private (e.g., trying to create a pseudo therapy bot, trying to simulate a foul mouthed smarmy sailor, or trying to generate ridiculous fake news articles about a Florida Man losing a fight to a wheel of cheese), and access to all sorts of models that get released.

I decided to try my hand at creating a simplified interface for interacting with it. The result: Super Simple ChatUI.

As if I need more side projects. So it goes!

Alright, this is pretty awesome! 🎉

Last night at 11:27PM, my little generative AI side project, ArtBot, crossed 10,000,000 images created. People have created some pretty cool stuff.

Some random stats from Google Analytics since it launched on October 9th, 2022 to now:

• 71,000 unique users
• 8.3 million page views.

ArtBot got another callout in PC World in the article: “The best AI art generators: Bring your wildest dreams to life.”

Though a bit of (fair) criticism at the end of the blurb though:

Why use Artbot? The vast number of AI models, and the variance in style those images produce. Otherwise, generating images via Artbot can be a bit of a crapshoot, and you may expend a great number of kudos simply exploring all the options. Since there’s no real setup besides figuring out the API key, Stable Horde (Artbot) can be worth a try.

Hey, I’ll take it!

Hah! This is pretty awesome. My nifty side project, ArtBot, has been written up in PC World as part of a larger article about Stable Horde (the open source backend that powers my web app):

Stable Horde has a few front-end interfaces to use to create AI art, but my preferred choice is ArtBot, which taps into the Horde. (There’s also a separate client interface, with either a Web version or downloadable software.)

Interestingly enough, ArtBot just passed 2,000,000 images generated!

The school shooting in Uvalde last week was horrible. As a parent, I feel so powerless to protect my kids from something like that. Taking them to school the next day was extremely emotional.

It’s clear that we, as a country, are going to continue to do nothing about guns and gun violence. I channeled some of my emotion into building an automated bot for Twitter. I call it SABS – Stochastic Analysis for Ballistics Superfans (alternative title is “Second Amendment Bullshit”).

If you’re so technically inclined, you can download and run it yourself. Powered by Node and a fun little experiment into Twitter’s API.

It automatically replies to any congressional member who tweets.

Which of course includes unhinged Republicans.

It seems like every year, late in the summer or early in the fall, the air in the Bay Area fills with thick smoke from raging infernos happening around northern California. The air is hazardous to breath, preventing you from taking kids to the park, walking your dog or even opening your windows.

Last year, we made the wise decision to purchase an air purifier, which admittedly, looks like a giant iPod shuffle.

As fires continue to burn around these parts, we’ve started to rely on air quality data from PurpleAir, which monitors air quality data from a series of IoT sensors that people can purchase for their homes or businesses.

You can view a map featuring realtime data collected from their sensors. Here in the Bay Area, the sensors are quite ubiquitous and can give a more realistic pictures of air quality near your home.

For example, here is the current air quality around the Bay Area from PurpleAir while I write this post.

For comparison, here is the current air quality map for Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), which we used to reference when trying to determine local air quality.

The fidelity you get from PurpleAir is pretty amazing.

Knowing this, I decided to write a Node app that periodically queries PurpleAir for air quality data from a sensor located a few blocks from our house. It continuously runs on a Raspberry Pi setup in our entertainment center and sends me a text message to close our windows when the AQI crosses above 100.

I’ve made the source code available on Github. Check it out!