vibe coding

Using the right tool for the job

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Updated UI for Voxsmith

Boy howdy am I learning a lot about robots, about what kind of capabilities the robots have, and how absolutely maddening they can be to use, if you are using the wrong one. Which has really been my experience using both Copilot and ChatGPT for more “advanced” task, like creating an advanced application that generates audio narration from Power Point speakers notes using Elevenlabs, for example.

You can go prompt after prompt and get into a real rhythm and knock out some serious work! Until, who knows why, they suddenly get into what I call a ‘dumb loop’, where you request something, and it says it’s going to do the thing as soon as you ask, so you ask, and it tell you it will do the thing after you ask, and so on. This happened to me frequently in both Chat and Copilot. I tightened up my asks quite a bit, and I would still get this.

Then, for coding, everything is going great, until a row is 3 spaces off, or there is an extra comma. Those are the things that take hours to resolve. I had an issue like this yesterday with Voxsmith. It was a regression that potentially messes up animations in Powerpoint. Spent over 7 hours yesterday with Chat and Copilot, and neither of them could correct it, even after I showed both of them the code where it worked in a previous version.

So, I switched to Claude. On the free version, I uploaded my app files, it did code review, I said bug report and in 3 revisions it got it right. Actually 2, but the third I was being pedantic. Call it 20 minutes. My mind was blown!

I signed up for a paid account immediately (and cancelled my ChatGPT paid account) and it did not mess around, getting to work right away with code clean up a complete UI refresh and a bunch of bug fixes. This was done in less than 8 hours total!

This post was going to be my first Voxsmith demo. If I’m honest, I’m really glad everything fell to shit on Monday with Chat and Copilot; then I wouldn’t have found Claude and wouldn’t have made the progress that I have made, because now I think I am using the correct tool for the job

App Updates

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The Voxsmith v2.1x track is almost complete. Only some final security touches and a feature implementation and it will be ready to rock. Demo video I expect should be ready sometime in the next couple of weeks.

And today I stuck a flag in the ground for my next app: FlowPath. There is a spec. There is a Powerpoint of mock screen layouts. There is a v0.0.1 that actually does the thing, in a very limited fashion. And I think it’s going to be pretty neat!

FlowPath is a How-To creator. Desktop only, cross platform, local first. It allows the user to create how-to’s quickly with screen shots and steps, saved to their local computer with the ability to sync to a team folder. Those How-To’s can then be viewed in the app or exported, shared or printed. It’s gloriously simple. And it will tie in with Voxsmith at some point, being able to create audio how-to’s and video walk-thru (future version).

I was going to break up with developing earlier this week. I was having some issues with my meds, which put me in a very bad place. Some naps and med changes later, I re-examed the project with new, slightly wearier eyes. And I started working.

But working in my way. I’m not a developer. At best, I could be called a “web designer”, but ew, no. What this really means is I am very visual. I have to see a thing before I can make it do what it needs to do. Backwards. Still, I started researching with ChatGPT, having it generate some wireframes. Those don’t quite get close enough for me, so I opened a blank powerpoint deck and quickly laid out the 4 primary screens of the app.

Did I mention gloriously simple?

A Home Screen, a creation screen, a setup screen and a reader, which is reused from the setup screen.

It will do its thing, it will do it quickly and without fault. Hopefully. And, it will do it on Windows, Mac and Linux. No, really. Comments are open if you have questions about Voxsmith or FlowPath.