NPTEL Applied Vibe Coding Workshop

[Anand S]

For those who missed my Applied Vibe Coding Workshop at NPTEL, here's the video:

You can also:

• Read this summary of the talk
• Read the transcript

Or, here are the three dozen lessons from the workshop:

• Definition: Vibe coding is building apps by talking to a computer instead of typing thousands of lines of code.
• Foundational Mindset Lessons
• "In a workshop, you do the work" - Learning happens through doing, not watching.
• "If I say something and AI says something, trust it, don't trust me" - For factual information, defer to AI over human intuition.
• "Don't ever be stuck anywhere because you have something that can give you the answer to almost any question" - AI eliminates traditional blockers.
• "Imagination becomes the bottleneck" - Execution is cheap; knowing what to build is the constraint.
• "Doing becomes less important than knowing what to do" - Strategic thinking outweighs tactical execution.
• "You don't have to settle for one option. You can have 20 options" - AI makes parallel exploration cheap.
• Practical Vibe Coding Lessons
• Success metric: "Aim for 10 applications in a 1-2 hour workshop" - Volume and iteration over perfection.
• The subscription vs. platform distinction: "Your subscriptions provide the brains to write code, but don't give you tools to host and turn it into a live working app instantly."
• Add documentation for users: First-time users need visual guides or onboarding flows.
• Error fixing success rate: "About one in three times" fixing errors works. "If it doesn't work twice, start again-sometimes the same prompt in a different tab works."
• Planning mode before complex builds: "Do some research. Find out what kind of application along this theme can be really useful and why. Give me three or four options."
• Ask "Do I need an app, or can the chatbot do it?" - Sometimes direct AI conversation beats building an app.
• Local HTML files work: "Just give me a single HTML file... opening it in my browser should work" - No deployment infrastructure needed.
• "The skill we are learning is how to learn" - Specific tool knowledge is temporary; meta-learning is permanent.
• Vibe Analysis Lessons
• "The most interesting data sets are our own data" - Personal data beats sample datasets.
• Accessible personal datasets:
  • WhatsApp chat exports
  • Netflix viewing history (Account > Viewing Activity > Download All)
  • Local file inventory (ls -R or equivalent)
  • Bank/credit card statements
  • Screen time data (screenshot > AI digitization)
• ChatGPT's hidden built-in tools: FFmpeg (audio/video), ImageMagick (images), Poppler (PDFs)
• "Code as art form" - Algorithmic art (Mandelbrot, fractals, Conway's Game of Life) can be AI-generated and run automatically.
• "Data stories vs dashboards": "A dashboard is basically when we don't know what we want." Direct questions get better answers than open-ended visualization.
• Prompting Wisdom
• Analysis prompt framework: "Analyze data like an investigative journalist" - find surprising insights that make people say "Wait, really?"
• Cross-check prompt: "Check with real world. Check if you've made a mistake. Check for bias. Check for common mistakes humans make."
• Visualization prompt: "Write as a narrative-driven data story. Write like Malcolm Gladwell. Draw like the New York Times data visualization team."
• "20 years of experience" - Effective prompts require domain expertise condensed into instructions.
• Security & Governance
• Simon Willison's "Lethal Trifecta": Private data + External communication + Untrusted content = Security risk. Pick any two, never all three.
• "What constitutes untrusted content is very broad" - Downloaded PDFs, copy-pasted content, even AI-generated text may contain hidden instructions.
• Same governance as human code: "If you know what a lead developer would do to check junior developer code, do that."
• Treat AI like an intern: "The way I treat AI is exactly the way I treat an intern or junior developer."
• Business & Career Implications
• "Social skills have a higher uplift on salary than math or engineering skills" - Research finding from mid-80s/90s onward.
• Differentiation challenge: "If you can vibe code, anyone can vibe code. The differentiation will come from the stuff you are NOT vibe coding."
• "The highest ROI investment I've made in life is paying $20 for ChatGPT or Claude" - Worth more than 30 Netflix subscriptions in utility.
• Where Vibe Coding Fails
• Failure axes: "Large" and "not easy for software to do" - Complexity increases failure rates.
• Local LLMs (Ollama, etc.): "Possible but not as fast or capable. Useful offline, but doesn't match online experience yet."
• Final Takeaways
• "Practice vibe coding every day for one month" - Habit formation requires forced daily practice.
• "Learn to give up" - When something fails repeatedly, start fresh rather than debugging endlessly.
• "Share what you vibe coded" - Teaching others cements your own learning. "We learn best when we teach."
• Tool knowledge is temporary: "This field moves so fast, by the time somebody comes up with a MOOC, it's outdated."

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From: s-anand.net