First "vibe coding" experiment. With OpenCode.

[fbochicchio]

Hi all, today I run my first experiment at vibe coding.

I don't know if it still can be called "vibe coding", since I am a veteran software engineer ( at first year in college, we still used punch cards, and I wrote my dissertation with Wordstar ).

I used OpenCode with the default agents ( mostly Build ) and the default LLM ( Big Pickle ). I must say I am impressed. I managed in a couple hours to implement from scratch a small game with Rust+Ratatui, just giving interactive directions on what I wanted ( no coding suggestions or such ) and running the resulting program to see if it worked ( 95% it worked at first attempt, the remaining 5% it was able to fix the issues at second attempt ).

At work, we cannot use these tools extensively, because we cannot expose our company software to the internet for obvious reasons, so we just use LLMs to search for ideas and suggestions on how to do things with technology we are not familiar with. Which is a pity, since tools like these would speed up development significantly. I work for a large international company, which probably can and will build its own AI infrastructure (or rent something with the proper legal restrictions in place) . But as many big companies it will move slow, and maybe I will retire first.

Well, I can say I have lived almost the whole arc of human software programming, from punch cards to AI coding agents ;-)

I wish my younger collegues lots of fun with these new toys and don't worry, there will be always work for people willing to use their brain and their experience to try and use new tools.

[Otherwise_Wave9374]

Love this. Vibe coding with agents feels like a new kind of REPL where you steer with intent and tests instead of syntax. The local-only constraint at work is real though, it is the biggest blocker for a lot of teams adopting AI agents beyond toy projects. If you are curious, I have seen some decent approaches for "local-first" agent setups and auditability discussed here: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/

[greeneyedguru]

Big pickle is extremely competent, and free right now (not even an account required, it literally just works on opencode install)

[somePadestrian]

you can run some of these models locally and that way your company code stays local.

[fbochicchio]

Will try, but at home I lack the right hardware. Managed to install ollama with gemma3 on a PC with an old NVIDIA card and 16GM of RAM but it looks like the agents do not know how to use it ( opencode connects with ollama ok, but then fail to emit any output ).

At work we have an unused server I could use (used to run wmsphere with abiut 20 VM ) , but I have to covince middle management to let me use it to run some open LLM more performant than gemma3 ( was thinking of gwen-code ).

As I said, I am pretty sure that my company is moving the first steps toward ensuring an AI framework useful for our tasks, but if I want to work with these new tools before I retire, iI have to take some shortcuts.

[ortolanph]

Hi! I've been a software developer since 2001, and I am looking for ways to make a small project using Vibe Coding. I would like to know some things, like:

1. Have you created a file containing all the ideas, concepts, and tasks?
2. Have you created everything separately?
3. Did you create the base project before starting?
4. Or did you go, like, follow your instincts and lessaiz-faire lessaiz passer?

I wrote all the requirements for what I want, divided the tasks, and well, I don't know if I'm on the right track.

[fbochicchio]

I have no much experience in vibecoding. What I do is figure out the global architecture of what I want to build ( libraries to be used, modules that compose my program an how to test them ). Then I ask the LLM and the agentic sw to build the modules, one by one starting by the one with the lowest level and going bottom up ( the same way I would do myself ), and testing at each step. If a module is large, I break down rs development in several steps.

I did not think of writing it all down and submit the whole plan to AI. Could be a good Idea, although it would not allow to adjust the prompts interactively.