Despite what many may think given my background, I’ve never been much of a coder.
I learned BASIC in 5th grade for all that’s worth. Since then it’s been a meandering path through C and C++, Perl, Scheme, Java, PHP, SQL, Python, JavaScript, and Rust—if you don’t count things like Bash. True to form, I dabbled in all of these when it was necessary to complete a project, but never really seized on any of them. It was just something I did at the time.
I’ve been “busy” fiddling around with agentic coding using the Pi agent. This time around, it’s to see what the real limits of a local agent and model truly are. Why? I ran out of Claude tokens on an unrelated project, and that made me wonder just how far I could get without using it in a pinch.
Last week I started working on a project, and this time I wanted to see what would happen if I did what all the “cool kids” are doing and “vibe coded” most of it. Let me just say it was an absolute disaster. I ended up with about 18k lines of iffy spaghetti code that only kind of does what I asked, is chock full of bugs, and isn’t anything I would ever willingly publish in my name. Just awful.