Bo Bennett On Vibe Coding And Old School Programming

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. Last time we got into the AI agent running everything, and today I want to push on vibe coding and how you're seeing this as a lifetime, old-school programmer. You were writing web-based systems before most people had heard of a browser. When you first sat down and described something to Claude Code and watched it build—not help, not suggest, actually build—what was that moment like for you as a programmer? Was it exciting, or did something feel like it was being taken away? GUEST: It was very exciting and it was more of a moment of awe rather than anything else. And it was also a I guess a kind of a evolution over a period of about a month because it actually started when I just had access to to Claude or actually at the time it was ChatGPT. And I asked ChatGPT to look at some code for me and clean it up and it did that. And then I I thought that was amazing. That was that was the first like wow, this is great. So I I cut and I pasted the code. I put it back into my script and then I I ran it and it worked. Um but then there was it was also kind of clunky and it wasn't the best process because it would only have a part of the code and it wouldn't know the whole script or how everything worked. So there was still a lot of my programming skills that were required to make this work. But still, it was amazing. It was like having your own personal uh programmer, programming expert who could help things uh out, help you out with things along the way. Uh but the next kind of wow moment was when I was working with uh Xcode. And with Xcode, there was the ability to hook up a um an LLM and you could actually have it write the code. And then I that was pretty amazing because now I I don't even need to know how to to create apps or write app code, which I never learned. And I I got to see it actually work. And that was again, a moment of awe and like wow. And then ultimately, I was exposed to open claw before Claude code or uh ChatGPT Codex. And that was like the biggest holy crap moment when I noticed that I could just tell it to create something like an entire website or a script and it'll actually do it. And that's when I knew things were going to change uh from this point on. HOST: So it wasn't one sudden moment, but a series of them, with that old school coding background you have moving from cleaning up snippets to building full websites. When you moved on to that "holy crap" moment, telling it to create an entire website, is vibe coding, in your view, actually engineering in natural language, or are we just prompting an AI engineer that's already learned how to do it all from billions of lines of code? GUEST: That's a good question and I'm not sure how to answer that because I don't know what's going on behind the scenes and most people don't. Virtually nobody does besides perhaps the the few experts in LLMs that actually program and create this. But what what I see is the end result. And whether LL the LLM gets there from understanding billions of lines of code and being able to construct something from that or being able to create something like in terms of pure creation. It's it's really it's indistinguishable from my perspective. I just know that like if I were talking to a human on the other end or a machine, I can't tell the difference. Actually, that's not true. The machine does everything within seconds. A human would take weeks. So that's the big difference. But besides that, it's it's hard to distinguish. HOST: That speed difference is definitely key, and the result being indistinguishable from human work in seconds is exactly why you've built Vibesies as a production layer. Now, you've explicitly positioned it as the "missing middle"—between no-code builders and bare-metal VPS. But Vibesies is Debian, full sudo, real apt install—but the user may not know how to touch a terminal. In episode 1 you told me that to make AI work you need "at least the fundamentals." Has vibe coding changed that calculus, or does your customer still need to know something about architecture? GUEST: Yeah, and I'm still playing around with that question. I'm not convinced yet that anybody with no experience in computers or programming can take up vibe coding and build fantastic websites. I think there's an architectural layer behind that and an understanding of how websites work that most people don't have. But I don't think it's a deal breaker for somebody who wants to get into it. I think it's just a matter of you need to learn and by learning you just do it. It's something that you could actually probably start with no background, but as you start learning you're um as you start building the websites you start learning and it's kind of like a um like an accelerated learning process as opposed to the old fashioned way of learning something, going to school or taking a course or whatever. You learn as you go. So, at this point, I'm not completely convinced that somebody could could master this with no experience. But those with even a little bit experience and with um the knowledge of how websites work and HTML works and so forth and and scripts work. Uh I think that it that's who this is really uh for and that is the market that is going to benefit the most from this. HOST: So you think there is definitely still a learning curve, but it's more of a "do and learn" model now, accelerated by the AI. Those people coming with general IT knowledge or basic HTML skills are really going to thrive on the platform, which brings me to the architecture itself. You've made the same design call three times now—AgentOutreach, PitchBud, and now Vibesies—keeping the user's credentials and reputation entirely in their own hands. Why is this recurring philosophy so important to you? What's the actual risk you're protecting against by never even seeing their API tokens? GUEST: Well, there's no reason for it. And I think people are a little bit weary of giving away tokens and secure information, and as they should be. But since there's no reason for it, there's no reason for us to to have any of that information, then why even take the chance? Why even put a potential customer through that anxiety if we don't need to? HOST: That makes sense—no reason to handle it if you don't have to, which also nicely segments your market toward people who are already AI fluent. Looking at the five personas on the site—the indie founder, newsletter creator, course creator, micro-agency, micro-store—you've also said, on this show, that AI tools aren't for everyone. So honestly: who is Vibesies NOT for? Who would sign up, fail, and churn? GUEST: I see the the users that use like a a $9 a month Squarespace account or $100 a year or free websites, people who just want to throw something up for like your uncle's birthday party or uh people who have no computer experience whatsoever and really just want that template driven, incredibly simple website uh for a a basic purpose. That's not the Vibe is not for them. This is for somebody who wants to really be able to do whatever they want. Like no limits, no templates, no script limits. They have full root access, which probably doesn't mean a lot to a lot of people uh technically, but practically it means that if anything you see on the internet basically, like, oh, that would be neat to do. You could tell your agent to do it and it could build it. It has that technology, it has that capability. It's not governed or moderated by a lack of having that uh pseudo or root access to the server. So, it it's pure creation. Anything that you want to create with a website, anything you want to do with Vibe is you could do it. HOST: I see, so that brings up an interesting question then, because you described Vibesies on the homepage as a "missing middle" solution. For the person who needs a real production server but doesn't want to manage everything, how do you actually handle the ongoing maintenance, you know, security patches and breaking changes, versus what a no-code solution handles on its own? Is that something the AI can really do? GUEST: Yes, certainly. If you want to make an analogy, this could be like sort of living in a townhouse or a condo as opposed to having your own house or as opposed to renting an apartment. So, like a townhouse or a condo, there's a lot of stuff there that's your own, but the the overall maintenance of the building, like the roof and the grounds, that's taken care of. You don't have to worry about that. And what's analogous to what we're doing here is all of the security patches, the uh the backups, anything that um that uh uh you would have to do otherwise if you had your own physical server or you had your own Amazon server, you don't have to worry about that. We take care of all of that. You just worry about your own website. HOST: Before we go, for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: You could look at uh vibesy.com. Uh that's the website we've been discussing and all of our websites are under archieboy.com. HOST: Good to have you back, Bo. This whole concept of vibe coding as a whole new paradigm for building software is really something to think about, especially considering your decades of old-school experience. And thank you, listener, for joining us. We'll have another insightful update coming soon — that's a wrap.