NPTEL Applied Vibe Coding Workshop

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:53:28 +0800

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

You can also:

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
1. “In a workshop, you do the work” - Learning happens through doing, not watching.
2. “If I say something and AI says something, trust it, don’t trust me” - For factual information, defer to AI over human intuition.
3. “Don’t ever be stuck anywhere because you have something that can give you the answer to almost any question” - AI eliminates traditional blockers.
4. “Imagination becomes the bottleneck” - Execution is cheap; knowing what to build is the constraint.
5. “Doing becomes less important than knowing what to do” - Strategic thinking outweighs tactical execution.
6. “You don’t have to settle for one option. You can have 20 options” - AI makes parallel exploration cheap.
Practical Vibe Coding Lessons
1. Success metric: “Aim for 10 applications in a 1-2 hour workshop” - Volume and iteration over perfection.
2. 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.”
3. Add documentation for users: First-time users need visual guides or onboarding flows.
4. 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.”
5. 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.”
6. Ask “Do I need an app, or can the chatbot do it?” - Sometimes direct AI conversation beats building an app.
7. Local HTML files work: “Just give me a single HTML file… opening it in my browser should work” - No deployment infrastructure needed.
8. “The skill we are learning is how to learn” - Specific tool knowledge is temporary; meta-learning is permanent.
Vibe Analysis Lessons
1. “The most interesting data sets are our own data” - Personal data beats sample datasets.
2. 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)
3. ChatGPT’s hidden built-in tools: FFmpeg (audio/video), ImageMagick (images), Poppler (PDFs)
4. “Code as art form” - Algorithmic art (Mandelbrot, fractals, Conway’s Game of Life) can be AI-generated and run automatically.
5. “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
1. Analysis prompt framework: “Analyze data like an investigative journalist” - find surprising insights that make people say “Wait, really?”
2. Cross-check prompt: “Check with real world. Check if you’ve made a mistake. Check for bias. Check for common mistakes humans make.”
3. Visualization prompt: “Write as a narrative-driven data story. Write like Malcolm Gladwell. Draw like the New York Times data visualization team.”
4. “20 years of experience” - Effective prompts require domain expertise condensed into instructions.
Security & Governance
1. Simon Willison’s “Lethal Trifecta”: Private data + External communication + Untrusted content = Security risk. Pick any two, never all three.
2. “What constitutes untrusted content is very broad” - Downloaded PDFs, copy-pasted content, even AI-generated text may contain hidden instructions.
3. Same governance as human code: “If you know what a lead developer would do to check junior developer code, do that.”
4. Treat AI like an intern: “The way I treat AI is exactly the way I treat an intern or junior developer.”
Business & Career Implications
1. “Social skills have a higher uplift on salary than math or engineering skills” - Research finding from mid-80s/90s onward.
2. Differentiation challenge: “If you can vibe code, anyone can vibe code. The differentiation will come from the stuff you are NOT vibe coding.”
3. “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
1. Failure axes: “Large” and “not easy for software to do” - Complexity increases failure rates.
2. Local LLMs (Ollama, etc.): “Possible but not as fast or capable. Useful offline, but doesn’t match online experience yet.”
Final Takeaways
1. “Practice vibe coding every day for one month” - Habit formation requires forced daily practice.
2. “Learn to give up” - When something fails repeatedly, start fresh rather than debugging endlessly.
3. “Share what you vibe coded” - Teaching others cements your own learning. “We learn best when we teach.”
4. 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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software-development on S Anand

NPTEL Applied Vibe Coding Workshop

Habits of a code addict

What programmers do

Theory of Constraints in software development

Comments

Good programmers

Comments

Microsoft not opening more source code

Comments

Writing software that pirates DVDs is legal

Laymen want documentation they understand

Microsoft to focus on security

Roll your own DSL

Joel on Software

Coimbatore the next IT destination

Microsoft dumps Java