A Writing Break to Vibe Code

Musings 2 Minutes

Last night and this morning, I took a break from writing to create an OpenClaw AI agent that, in time, will serve as an admin assistant, and which I can send out into the (digital) world to accomplish things for me.

That turned out to be reasonably easy to do (with substantial help from Grok). That got me wondering how far vibe coding had come since I tried it last (I spent most of 2024 and all of 2025 writing instead of coding.

The last time I tried vibe coding was back in 2024, when I was both writing “Skeleton Trail” (“The Gunfighter” series, book 1) and occasionally coding on the “Gunfighter” tactical dueling web game that Gary Cooper and I created. At that time, I tried doing some vibe coding with Claude (Anthropic AI), and it produced as many bugs as it fixed, and I just couldn’t get it to generate working code for some tasks at all. It was cool, but flawed (not that I should be throwing stones!).

In those days, I was trying to vibe code my way around ignorance–I wanted functionality that really required JavaScript to work, but I didn’t have the time or patience to learn JavaScript up to the intermediate level I needed. So I’d gone into vibe coding hoping Anthropic could carry my weaknesses for me.

Today, I took another stab at it, hoping to (quickly!) fix one of the bits of game functionality that’d bugged me for a long time.

Wow… AI code generation has come a long way in the last year or so!

Today, with a few clicks I added OpenAI’s Codex extension to Microsoft’s VS Code IDE, opened the php file I wanted fixed, opened the Codex chat window, and described what I wanted. I told it what I wanted added to the page, where it should go, and described briefly how the functionality should work. Just plain English. ChatGPT Codex came back with: “Here are the lines that need to be added (or changed) to your code. Do you want me to make the modifications for you?

Sure, I thought. What the hell; I’d made a backup. I clicked yes. It made the changes. I uploaded the php page to the server and…it just worked.

So now I’m thinking of the other aspects of the game that I could improve, probably effortlessly (including fixing a bastardized AJAX implementation I hacked together to make the main dueling page more elegant. I bet my AI assistant(s) could make that MUCH more functional now…and maybe even look more professional. Something tells me that it can probably design a UI better than I ever could.

But I also need to get crackin’ on book 3, since books 1 and 2 will not go into the publication queue until the publisher has seen where the first half of book 3 is taking the series…😫

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Published by Kevin H.

Bio: I grew up a Navy brat, then enlisted in the U.S. Army Infantry at age 21. I entered as a private, earned selection for and admission into Officer Candidate School, then spent the rest of the time wearing bars. After several years training force-on-force unit combat in the Mojave with the Army's elite mechanized OPFOR, and then the joy of command while at Fort Carson, CO, which included the challenges and rewards of taking a company of soldiers to Saudi Arabia and bringing them all home safely, I left the military in search of new experiences. Like many who leave the military, I hit some hiccups trying to figure out how to communicate to civilians that a decade of training soldiers to aggressively close with and kill the enemy was an experience that would translate swimmingly into their company culture. Eventually I overcame that communication challenge. That led to several years doing the "corporate thing," pursuing a career that led from retail to IT, following my passions for computers and communications developed as a(n) (unlikely) hobby while a soldier. In the late nineties, I had the good fortune to hire into one of the pioneer companies in the (then new) massively multiplayer online game industry. While there I saw opportunity to start my own company and used all my experiences (and no small amount of learning new skills on the fly!) to build an online payment processing company. My first company, PayByCash, brought local non-credit-card payment methods from around the world to Internet content providers with one very simple integration. After growing for 8 years and earning the trust of the largest game content providers in the world (and most of the smaller ones as well), we merged with a VC-funded Silicon Valley company and were later acquired by Visa. In my on-again-off-again "retirement," as a serial entrepreneur, I develop (and occasionally launch) new ventures. When not torturing myself with the responsibility to nurse my whackadoodle ideas into profitability, I spend the time with my family that I rarely had when running my first (and to date most successful) company. And I write, sporadically and spasmodically. When not writing, I race cars and enjoy improving my skills in the shooting sports.

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