Introduction

So why are my machines starting up?

Starting the Session

I'll tell you a little bit about myself.

Background

I'm an AI developer and data engineer and I've been coding software developing for commercially over 30 years.

Professional Experience

So what I'm going to show you is probably the most exciting thing that I've actually seen in the last 30 years and the biggest change to software development. It blows your mind when you see what it does.

Live Demo

I've got a couple of caveats before I do my demo, and the first one is, this is a live demo. The second one is, this is a live demo.

Caveats and Preparations

And I'm just going to throw in for you as well, I'm not a React developer. I do a lot of other software, so if it all goes horribly wrong, we'll see whether we can figure it out. We'll find out.

Okay.

Now this is what comes from staring at a screen for so many years. You have to wear glasses eventually. Hopefully they make me look smart.

Choosing a Provider

So there's lots of different providers out there at the moment for vibe coding and the one I've picked actually is Loveable for two reasons. The first one it's really easy and the second one is I just like the name.

all right so can you see my screen terrific okay so we're going to present mode now just give you a little bit of history Okay, I've pressed it enough times now.

Terrific.

So, nothing endures but change.

This is probably my favourite saying from Heraclitus, who does a lot of different wonderful things. It was obviously a few hundred years ago.

Impact on Software Development

But I've seen a lot of change, and this vibe coding is probably the biggest one that I've seen, the biggest impact that it's going to have.

Concept of Vibe Coding

So the term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in just this year and he's obviously, well not obviously, but he's former AI at Tesla and co-founder of OpenAI. Rick Rubin actually describes it as the punk rock of software.

And he's actually just developed a little book recently that you can go and have a look at online. So there we go.

Best Practices

So this is how you would get the best results if you're going to go ahead and use vibe coding. You want to have really clear prompts.

You want to have logical skills and think about how you want your application to work and the step through. You can even do a little flow chart and write it down.

Challenges and Approach

You've got to have patience. That's one thing, because these are non-deterministic, as we've heard already today. And you don't know what you're going to get.

Life is a box of chocolates, I guess.

So debugging discipline as well. If things go horribly wrong, then you can actually ask the vibe coding utility how to get out of the problem that you've got. And a lot of times, you will actually be able to work through it.

So they're really powerful, and they're very clever. Well, they're not actually. clever underneath, but they've got a lot of knowledge. They've got millions of lines of code in their database.

And if you're doing it for a business purpose, then you definitely want to make sure that you're including the framework of your business rules in that.

Providers and Insights

So these are some of the providers and I'm just going to tell you a little bit about them. What I might do is actually go over and start the demo and whilst that is working I'll tell you about a couple of those which have hit the news just recently.

Live Example

So I'm going to go over to Lovable Dev. Lovable Dev gives you five prompts for free, and if you are clever about it, this is per day too, if you're clever about it, you could actually use it just for free, come back the next day if you've still got things to work on.

So, here we go. Remember, live demo.

So it's wonderful to see some people coming back here to the Mindstone AI events. I think they're wonderful events, probably the best in London for meetups and also finding out.

Yeah, I've been to quite a few. And also, you know, meeting new people and finding out new tools. Even though I'm in the business, I don't get time to play around with everything.

And for example, Gamma, that was mentioned before, I've used it for my demonstration. It's really fast, it's easy, it's free. Hey, we like free. I like free anyway.

So here we go, yes, accept all. Yep, I'm logged in. Okay, so I've given it a prompt here.

I've run this a few times through. Each time I get something a little bit different, non-deterministic again. And what it's doing, let me just see it.

Yep, okay, so it's looking at my request. It's going to create a beautiful and engaging event feedback form. That's what we want.

It's going to be clear. It's going to be professional. It's going to have a five-star rating.

It's going to slice. It's dice. Just kidding. Didn't ask it to do that.

So what it's doing at the moment is it's writing TypeScript. It's writing React code. As I said, I'm not a React developer. And what we'll see is all of that coming up on the screen.

And there's no way I can code that fast. I'm fast, but I'm just not that fast. So these tools are really quite amazing.

I do use some code completion in my day to day job. I don't use this. I've got some benefits for you to have a look at in the next slide after we do the demo.

and also some risks too, because AI is, you've got to be careful. If you're putting out your company data, don't do that.

So whilst that is working away, I want to tell you about a couple of things that have happened recently in this space.

Recent Developments

Windsurf was sold for $3 billion. $3 billion. That's really quite a lot of money just earlier this year.

OpenAI has bought that.

AnySphere is a startup behind the AI Coding Assistant Cursor, and they have... reportedly closed a $900 million funding and they've given a valuation of $9.9 billion as well. That's what that company is worth at the moment. Bloomberg is saying that this three-year-old company now generates $500 million annualized revenue, making it one of the fastest growing startups of all time.

And just in the last four or five days, there's been a company, there's one solo-owned company Base 44 sold to Wix for 80 million cash just this week, six months old.

I'm like, oh God, why didn't I think of that? And maybe together we will come up with the next vibing tool using the vibing code.

So here we go. Look at that. Look at that.

Now, one of the things you can do is you can go in and you can actually see what's happened in the background there. You can see the code as well. And what we'll do, as every good developer would do, is we always test.

Okay, so I've asked it to, and I'm going to be asking you all to give some feedback about the events that we have here, and I say we, the royal we, I don't put them on, Joshua does, but we'll ask you for some words to describe it. I'm going to ask you for a star rating, and as you can see, the number of times you've come along so let's do this let's do AI and I'm going to add and I'm going to do networking and I'm going to add and I'm going to do I don't know give me one give me some words demos thank you fun all right now how would we rate obviously it's going to be five stars and I'm going to put

How often do I use it as well? These are all from my prompt up here. Okay, so these are all from the prompt. It has just followed my instructions through.

And as an optional item, what would you like to see more of? Well, obviously we'd like some more demos.

Okay. Now submit feedback. Wonderful.

It created the word cloud that I asked for. And you know what? I'm just thinking here now to myself, Wouldn't it be nice if we had those words in some colour? So why don't we ask it to do that?

Okay. I'm always polite to it. All right, here we go.

Capabilities of AI Tools

So these tools are really amazing for anyone who has no coding development. You can get out there and create your MVP. You can go and mock something up really quickly.

This has taken minutes. It's amazing.

If you know the code, you can go and have a look. And it would be a great way to learn it as well if you're interested.

But what's the point now, really?

Okay, let's have a look. It's still writing.

Now, as I said before, you can actually see what's happening in the background, and we didn't see all of that coming up, but that's just one page that it has written, and it's written quite a number of them for us. It's so fast.

So look at that. That's wonderful. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that.

What I'm going to do now is, at the background here, it's using a temporary database, so if I close the browser, it would disappear altogether, and so I'm going to hook it up to... free free database we like free and actually get you guys to all put in your opinions of tonight so and the word the mind stone events so I'm going to go back to here's when I created earlier

Now I'm actually asking it here to specifically name a table. And I have a reason for that is because I've done a couple of tests of it, just making sure that everything was going to be OK. And I've got tables in the background of the database.

Superbase, even though it's free, when you're on a free tier, you don't have a huge amount of storage. You don't have bandwidth and that sort of thing. You will.

There is a slight cost to it. But if you're happy with your project, you can go ahead and pay for it.

so what's it doing here right to save the results i'm just going to follow the instructions okay I really think that coming up with something to handle at the side of a machine would have made me millions, but I haven't, so I'm just going to do it anyway.

All right, here we go. I'm going to connect Superbase. Connector project.

Wonderful. Okay, terrific. So it said, oh, I found some tables already.

No problem at all. It's connected. Insert elevator music here.

All right. Terrific. Okay.

So it's suggesting, all right, I'm going to create a table. I'm looking at that because I know SQL. I'm like, yep, okay. And I'm going to say apply changes.

I'm just going to trust it. Now, in a production environment, I would probably go through it with a fine-tooth nail and comb. I wouldn't roll this out to your clients, but it's okay for a demo purposes.

And it's okay for a little MVP if you just want to show something to someone quickly. All right, so it's working. Perfect.

Sounds so nice. So it's going to update those files in the background. Look at that, it's so fast.

You can scroll back up as well if you wanted to, to review. There we are. It's going on to the next page. Just thinking while that's happening we might scoot back over to this.

Maybe you all got a screenshot of that.

Benefits and Risks

Let's have a look now at some of the benefits versus the potential risks.

So the benefit obviously as I'm showing you here is rapid prototyping and fantastic for MVP. It gives non-developers an entry point, so you can go in and see how things are made, see how things connect. It reduces repetitive tasks, and I've found that for myself as a professional developer.

There's free tiers, and it integrates easily with popular platforms. The list that I had previously is a variety of web-based only and also for, I know, professional developers who are using Windsurf and Cursor for their main platforms. They are professionals, though. They do know how to close any security loopholes there.

Assessing AI Benefits

So you've got the risks, as I mentioned before. You've got insecure code, potentially.

You've got over-reliance in AI. And I've got to say, I'm actually falling into this pitfall myself. If I've got a really tricky coding problem, I'll just go and ask a large language model. And I think, oh gosh, should I really be thinking about this and working through? But I'm like, oh, it's quicker, isn't it?

And you may have limited customisation if you aren't sure what's happening there. You may have to dig into it. It might be really tricky to debug to.

Your output quality varies by provider. And your lack of understanding of what's behind in the code. You might end up with a lot of technical debt.

Exploring Risks

so here we go oh there was an error this is not good so i'm going to try and fix it let's see all right it thinks it's been fixed let's have a look it's got a database warning but i'm pretty sure that's because i haven't secured it down

Feedback Collection

Excellent, alright that looks like it is working and I would invite you to take a picture of the QR code and provide us with some feedback. You can ask it as well when you're doing these sort of forms. You can ask it to make things optional or not. I've made everything mandatory except for the last box in there.

Conclusion

Thank you.