My First Vibe Coding Hackathon

This past weekend my company did their first vibe coding hackathon. If you're not familiar with vibe coding, it's a new craze where you let AI Agents code your entire application and you just prompt the AI with "vibes." Pure vibe coding requires having zero coding knowledge, but developers have started finding ways to have the AI do most of the code writing while they review and analyze the output and make tweaks when needed.

Over the weekend, we were asked to use Replit and their AI Agent to create a working prototype of a useful application. The top 3 applications would be given money to the company store (which I personally enjoy since there are some quality items there) and we could present our applications to the company leadership. I threw my hat into the ring because why not! I hadn't vibe coded yet, but it would be good to know what's out there and the current state of AI.

This post won't go into the nuts and bolts of the app, but in about 7-8 hours I was able to build a working application that was 90% functional. It was a feature request tool that allowed your customers to request features they'd want to see in internal applications developed at their company. I took this idea actually from Compass Real Estate, where I used to work. They allowed their real estate agents to submit feature request for the Compass software tools. Much like Compass' tool, users of my application could:

• Submit feature requests
• Upvote other people's requests if they liked them (Reddit style)
• Comment on feature requests
• See new requests submitted in the past 48 hours
• Review previous completed requests

Administrators had a special Admin Center page where they could:

• Perform all the tasks in the above list
• Consolidate duplicate feature requests
• Add special "Admin comments"
• Delete feature requests
• Update the development status of feature requests

A screenshot of the main application page is below:

A screenshot of the admin center is below:

What I learned about Vibe Coding

AI Agents are not bad. They are not experts yet, but they do a pretty good job getting a basic application spun up really quick. This whole application took me two days, but really I spent 7-8 hours total doing everything. 

A lot of that 7-8 hours though was time spent waiting on the AI to finish analyzing, coding, reviewing, and processing all the changes I would request. While the AI is pretty good, it still can take 5-10 minutes to make a change, especially as the code base increases. 

Another good chunk of the time was taken up fixing bugs introduced by the AI when working on something completely unrelated. Several times the AI would mess something up in the application that was completely removed from what it was supposed to be working on. For example, when I had it work on the left-side navigation bar of the Admin Center, it also put the Update Status, Consolidate, and Delete button in one inline row and changed the button label for Update Status. Why??? I spent about 20 minutes getting the AI to fix the buttons without hurting anything else.

The AI Agents was not able to get the Search functionality working perfectly. I ended up flipping back and forth between two bugs in the search tool. When I fixed one issue, a second bug would appear. When I fixed that second bug, the first one came back. After a few rounds of that, I got the search working as best I could and left it at that. At the time of this writing, that is an active bug.

Another thing I learned was the AI is very verbose with writing code. This application has to be several thousand lines long. I feel like a human software engineer could write this in half the lines. But one nice thing about Replit's AI Agent at least is that it would give you an outline of what it was doing and give you a hyperlink to go in and check the specific file it is working on. I feel like if I was not rushing and trying to create as much as I can in one weekend, that is a very useful feature in the AI logic.

Overall Thoughts

Overall I felt more like a Product Owner this weekend and not a developer. I certainly didn't personally build this application, but I provided the ideas, creativity, prompts, and analysis that gave the application the look and feel. I wonder if that's what the developer profession will be one day - a world where we will all be product owners of some sort just requesting changes and troubleshooting manually when needed. Or maybe humanity will think "nah, this sucks. We want humans!" I hope it's the second option. 

Right now, the Agentic AI could get me nearly there. But it can't get this application to 100%. Advances are being made, and I'm sure in the future AI will be better and quicker. However for now, you still need some humans around. And I hope coding doesn't lose it's humanity any time soon.