Tuesday, 7th October 2025
Vibe engineering
I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?
[... 1,313 words]For quite some I wanted to write a small static image gallery so I can share my pictures with friends and family. Of course there are a gazillion tools like this, but, well, sometimes I just want to roll my own. [...]
I used the old, well tested technique I call brain coding, where you start with an empty vim buffer and type some code (Perl, HTML, CSS) until you're happy with the result. It helps to think a bit (aka use your brain) during this process.
— Thomas Klausner, coining "brain coding"