January 11, 2026

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.”

Astral released Ty (Beta) last month. As a prototyper, I don’t type check much - it slows me down. But the few apps I shipped to production had bugs type checking could have caught. Plus, LLMs don’t get slowed by type checking. So I decided to check if Ty can spot real bugs in real code. I asked ChatGPT: Run ty (Astral’s new type checker) on a few popular Python packages’ source code, list the errors Ty reports (most of which may be false positives), and identify at least a few that are genuine bugs, not false positives. Write sample code or test case to demonstrate the bug. ...

Mapping The Red Headed League is a fascinating reconstruction of the actual places mentioned (or hinted at) by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Red Headed League by Aman Bhargava. We cross-reference railway timetables, scrutinize Victorian newspaper reports and historical incidents, scour government records, analyze meteorological data, and, in my specific case, pore over Ordnance Survey maps to make the pieces fit. What struck me is how little London has changed, how much old data is available, and what love it takes to reconstruct such a journey! ...

This week, I learned: Software Heritage is a non-profit that archives software. You can submit any Git repo for archival. Over 400 million projects have been archived so far. Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson (2005) argues that pop culture isn’t all bad. But it isn’t all good either, unlike the book’s claims. Claude Popular culture formats (e.g. video games, manga, soap operas, game shows) are steadily more cognitively demanding, complex. They provide a dopamine kick from problem-solving. These may have led to the Flynn Effect (rising IQs in 1990s-2000s). Or it may be due to nutrition, smaller families, education, etc. Action games correlate with visual-spatial skills. Strategy games correlate with memory, planning. But is it causation? It doesn’t always translate to real-world skills. Also, side effects are real and bad: screen-time, addiction, misinformation, etc. The purpose of a featured image in a blog post is to help readers decide whether to read it. Share the article’s output/focus (e.g. for data stories, products). Else a visual summary (e.g. sketchnote, comic capturing the essence). Else skip. Avoid stock photos. # NFLSavant.com has play-by-play data for NFL games. Ten of the least well known psychology / sociology research findings. ChatGPT Learning styles are a myth. People might prefer visual / audio / … learning but it doesn’t help learning. Mix learning modes. NotebookLM can help. Casual acquaintances help find new information or jobs much more than close friends, since they’re in different social circles. Nurture weak ties. Use a relationship architect. Tell a lie often enough and people mistake familiarity for truth. Fact-check habitually. The more you see / hear something the more you like it. (Exposure effect.) Expose to good things. When others mess up, we blame them. When we mess up, we blame the situation. (Attribution error.) Pause before judging. Sometimes, rewarding people makes them like doing it less. (Overjustification effect.) People who know less over-estimate their knowledge. (Dunning-Kruger effect.) Habitualize calibration via feedback and tests. People do worse when they’re afraid their failure will reflect on their stereotype. (Stereotype threat.) Practice emotional resets. Higher expectations lead to better performance. (Pygmalion effect.) Engineer positive expectations. Benevolent sexism (e.g. protective paternalism) can be harmful too. Scan for well-meaning bias. Liberalism => economic growth, peace and expanding rights. Also colonial violence, exclusions (women, slavery, …), and eroding community. It is vulnerable to authoritarianism (e.g. emergency powers, recessions). Since 2006, democracy has consecutively declined, reversing half the progress since WW2. But alternatives are unclear. Claude Notes from The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Pure Zinc does not dissolve easily in sulphuric acid. An impurity like Copper Sulphate pulls electrons from Zinc and offers them to Hydrogen ions, speeding up the reaction. Impurities, foreign bodies, etc. have a purpose, too. Discomfort = Information. Overcoming discomfort = Capability. Capability = Freedom. Therefore: Seeking discomfort (carefully, purposefully) = Building freedom. Simple != Easy. Simple = Clear. Clear = Actionable. Indifference often feels like malice. ⭐ Analogies have limits. (The Map is not the Territory.) When using analogies, always explore where, when and why they will break. Pay close attention near where they break. ⭐ Knowledge vanishes with people unless written down. Write “Do X. Because of Y. Unless Z changes.” The last two are critical. I could NOT have read the book without a Randall Munroe re-styling. I cried anyway. “There’s about 300-400 that were corporate assets. One watched them all the time. These are people who in 15 years could be CEO. There’s something about them that caught your fancy when you were in a meeting… brilliant ideas that challenged your thinking… We called them “Corporate Assets” and tracked them, to make sure we game-planned them, give them the right assignments.” Indra Nooyi, The Knowledge Project The accesskey attribute works a bit like magic. Adding an accesskey="h" on a home page link, or an accesskey="t" on a theme toggle button automatically enables keyboard shortcuts Alt+H or Alt+T to activate them. (Varies by browser and OS, but hovering shows the shortcut!) Familiarity and recency feel like learning but they’re not. Instead: Take tests. Review (spaced repetition). Interleave learning. That’s what helps. Claude Make It Stick (Peter C. Brown, 2014) A Mind for Numbers (Barbara Oakley, 2014) Ultralearning (Scott Young, 2019) How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens, 2017)