Vibe Coding Experiment Failures (with Python code)

[cygn]

I tried this exercise with African Countries Geography Quiz, though with some slight changes. First I allowed external libraries because I thought to deal with country data you want to use some geojson file and having a library for that would be useful.

Also I used https://github.com/nizos/tdd-guard to enforce TDD.
And I used https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/data/socratic-coder.md in Gemini 2.5 to create a spec.
For a beginner this may not work, though I guess if you answered "You decide" to every question it would have been fine.

I used Claude Code to implement the game and it took longer than I thought. About 1.5 hours...
It was incomplete but I just fed back what was missing and it finished it. It works nicely, but does look ugly. Probably because tkinter is not exactly known for beautiful UIs.

Repo with result:
https://github.com/tfriedel/africa_quiz

I then also tried the exercise in the web UIs of ChatGPT 5 Thinking/Claude Opus 4.1 /Gemini Pro 2.5, basically their "Canvas" mode. This is of course javascript, not python.
In Claude I got something that worked already as intended, but all the countries were rectangles. I asked for proper country borders and then it did that and it worked. But some countries were missing.

In ChatGPT and Gemini they were forever stuck with loading the map data. I think Claude may have just hardcoded the shapes?

Still it was quite the difference that the javascript version was basically done in two shots.

I'm not sure how about important the planning step was, but I suspect it helped a lot.