Vibing to the sound of squares

2026-05-08

Vibes
Finding the right problem to play with
The joy of sequencers
Dopamine microdosing

After listening to Armin and Yury I realized I definitely needed a good enough pet project to start experimenting with Agentic Coding.

Agentic Coding powered by Cursor, Claude, or Kiro has been definitely useful at work for copy/paste-like tasks, getting a quick stack-overflow-esque solution to unblock something, and so on. Despite that, I have felt so far there was nothing particularly major giving me that "oh yeah that's great" reaction.

Most of my work revolves around prototyping and re(-designing) Data Science/Machine Learning products. Be it tooling for data scientists, or traditional modeling pipelines. Simply put, at work I was not getting the vibes.

Vibes¶

Then I saw Mistral launched vibe. Oh hey that looks nice. Let's try it out.

Finding the right problem to play with¶

As a recent dad I decided that buying cloud-based baby monitors was a no-go. Why can't I run an old iPhone as an IP Camera on my local network only?

Well that sounded like a good idea. Until after many attempts and iterations I realized I had no idea how webRTC worked, how a good end-to-end deployment locally would fit, and some more. After one failed iteration I decided to redo everything.

Now it was clearer how to steer the tool, especially around uv usage and starlite.

Then it hit me: while this is a good project in the long run, there is something else that I don't really care about its inner workings, but do care about the experience.

The joy of sequencers¶

Back in the late 90s there was one thing extremely important in my life: weekends with my 10 year older cousins. And it was during these weekends that I discovered a new passion: Propellerhead's ReBirth. Yep yep, many hours recording the system sound and then cutting/copying/pasting it on Audacity (?) because ReBirth's free version would freeze after a while. This was a key gateway for my musical journey. Great for me, maybe not so great for everyone else around me since then :-3

Dopamine microdosing¶

Something crazy happens during parenthood. There's not enough time to do the basics, but there's plenty of time to contemplate life, get extremely bored, and sleepy as well.

Those 30 minute stints of trying to calm a baby, walking around the house. Which then turn into 90 minutes of trying to keep the baby asleep while your partner takes a well deserved rest. I don't know how this sounds like a positive thing in my head, but maybe that's the price of sleep deprivation.

Vibe coding has provided me the means of making incremental positive changes to a small project in just a few prompts:

Brain slowly thinks for 30 minutes
One hand slowly types a prompt
vibe works
A new sequencer synth now exists in my browser.

Simple. Yet powerful. And all that tiredness? Turned into happiness.

Why does this matter? I feel it's easy to get addicted. Like a new toy, all these short pleasure dumps of turning nothing into something interactive are effectively addictive. Like dopamine microdosing.

The code does not have to be leet. It just needs to work. It's not for monetization, it's for experimentation. Allowing myself to play with these tools is my new hobby it seems. Due to life shenanigans I cannot simply put in the hours required to learn and build synthetisers from scratch these days. Maybe in 10 years. Now all I want is to make a simple, free to use, sequencer with drums, synths, some filters and big squares.