i "built" two websites this week

Show of hands if you've heard the term "vibecoding"? I first heard it on one of my favorite podcasts Hard Fork which covers the dizzying pace of tech advances, but in an accessible and entertaining way. The basics of vibecoding is that you can now build websites and software without really knowing what you're doing. You just go on vibes. And simple prompts in plain English that the AI platform of your choice can translate into real, working code. I really like this advancement because I've never had the patience or technical expertise to actually build a website. I even got frustrated with the templates on Squarespace and also here on this blog platform Wix (no offense, Wix, please don't take revenge on my blog!) But experimenting with Claude the last few days, I've built two sites and it's astonishing how fast and easy it is now. One is a single serving site of information about my documentary Brother Orange that I'm sending to people who may be interested in setting up a screening of the film. The other is based on a bit that I started with my friends Abbie and Matt when they moved to Venice beach. I put together a list of movies that take place in Venice (CA) and called it the Venice Film Festival. It started out in my notes app when I sent it to them last year, but this morning I spent about 45 minutes in Claude and turned it into this site. Next step is talking to the programmers at Vidiots about getting this out into the real world, who doesn't want to see a Venice CA Film Festival???

So, I'm actually not sure if I'm using Claude Code or just regular Claude, because I truly barely know what I'm doing, but whatever it is it seems to be working so far. I know there are very legitimate objections to using AI, and this is probably a rationalization on my part, but vibecoding websites feels like one of the less problematic uses of this technology. I'm not taking a job away from anyone, these are sites that no one else would have any interest in building and are not profit-generating. Also, I don't think generating html code is anywhere near as resource intensive as generating video. And now that AI is completely integrated into everything that Google does, it's hard for me to see a clear separation between using AI and using the internet. I know it's bleak, but anytime you do anything online there's a resource cost. Which is bad! But from my limited understanding of the AI companies, Claude is the least bad in that they haven't completely jettisoned their ethics department and their CEO at least pays lip service to ethics and safety concerns. Like I said before, I'm mostly finding ways to justify these new vibecoding experiments because I have fun playing around with them. My first ever experiments with computer programming were in elementary school using the Logo programming language on an Apple II. It looked like this and I felt like an actual wizard being able to move the "turtle" around the screen:

I remember my friend Michael Rattner and I also built our version of a computer dating program in BASIC that would randomly match kids in our fourth grade class with other classmates of the opposite sex. In our wildest 1987 imaginations we never would have dreamt of same sex pairings. I'm sure Michael did most of the coding work considering the fact that he became an actual engineer as an adult making life-saving nanotechnology whereas I edit dirty cartoons for a living. To think, we could have founded Tinder! The computer language we used looked something like this:

via Kurt Leuch's blog

Well, I've got some serious vibecoding to get back to. See you at the Venice Film Festival!