I've been interested in technology my whole life. From the moment my Dad brought home a C64 in 1983, I was hooked. Mostly, I've been a user of technology, I dabbled in coding when at university in the early 90s, though not enough to produce anything that worked. It was always a regret as throughout my career, first in finance and then as a business psychologist, I've had many ideas for solutions that required coding skills.
Those ideas have stayed as ideas, and I've moved on. That is until now.
In April, I met up with an old friend, who just happens to be an experienced programmer, and he mentioned this "thing" called "vibe coding" and a platform called Replit.
I looked it up and the sales pitch is this — Just type a description of what you want to build into the prompt box, it could be an app or a game or website, and Replit will build it for you. You supposedly need zero knowledge or experience; you just need to tell it what you want and away it goes!
After some brief research I found out that there were various vibe coding platforms to choose from, with different levels of complexity. I settled on the Google platform, Firebase Studio (which is powered by Google's AI model, Gemini), mostly because the backend elements such as authentication, storage, and database, are provided seamlessly. As a complete novice, having everything in one place gave me so much confidence (in truth I don't think it's that hard to sort out backend stuff with other platforms).
My first idea involved building a platform to host our Situational Judgement Tests. We've developed a variety of assessments specifically for the waste and recycling sector, and I was curious to see what was possible.
For my first attempt, I typed away, describing what I wanted, and pressed enter — Firebase Studio jumped into action, considered what I'd asked for, told me what it was going to do, including the look and the colours. Then I simply needed to say yes, crack on, and whoosh, it was off, lines and lines of code being produced in a matter of seconds. It was like watching the computer screens in The Matrix, with lines of code simply appearing! It was fascinating and exciting to see!
Firebase Studio finished and posted the results for me to see. At first you are in the prototype stage, where the initial app is produced and you can play about with it locally, make changes, add things, remove things, before deciding to publish it with a real-life working webpage.
The initial result was both exciting and disappointing. It sort of looked like I wanted it to look, and some aspects worked. I could add a new assessment which took me through to another page where it could be constructed, but there was no functionality in that page, the app didn't work. I also didn't like the structure of the app and realized that there were so many things I hadn't thought about.
In fact, I'd basically jumped in and played about a bit, which is fine, I think "free-swimming" with these things is a great way to learn how to use them, but if I wanted more then I needed a different approach.
I realised that if I was going to build an actual platform to host my assessments, then I needed to think like a developer. I needed to be structured and considered in my approach. So, I mapped it out on a word document, outlining in detail the functionality of every aspect of the app. How it linked together, what I wanted to be able to do and why.
Having finished, I copied the whole document and pasted it into ChatGPT. I told it what I was doing and asked if it could improve the structure of the prompt for Firebase Studio. Amazingly, this provided some great improvements to the prompt, and I pasted it straight into Firebase Studio and then sat back as it whooshed into action again.