What REALLY Went Wrong with My Vibe Coding Live Stream

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, I'm just getting set to go to the office. Um, going to be going every day this week because I have employees coming in from out of uh the country, which is super cool. Um, someone scheduled a meeting for me right at 9:05. I'm going to be late, so I have to cut this video off short cuz I'll have to take the call from the car. um says it's going to be an hour to get to work because I have to leave a little earlier to get there at the same time just cuz of traffic, which is super stupid. But I think there was miscommunication when I said uh after 9. I think they they took that as like at 9 was okay, but that's not okay. So anyway, um I got to rush to work. But uh for the topic today, I wanted to talk about the live stream I did last night, which was uh like some vibe coding attempt with agents in cursor.

Uh I want to talk about that because I'm not happy about it. And not happy uh not meaning like oh just disappointed with cursor or something like that. I'm like I'm not happy with my my stream. So I wanted to take some accountability for that. Um, so before I dive into that, just a friendly reminder, this channel is all about answering your questions. So, uh, leave them below if you have questions about software engineering or career development sort of stuff. Otherwise, you can send a message into Dev Leader on social media. It's also my main YouTube channel. It's where the live stream was. Uh, Devleer YouTube has uh, like C tutorials. It has ré reviews. If you want to have your resume reviewed for free, you can go check out the channel, watch one of the videos from that playlist, and it explains how to submit it.

So, uh, take advantage of that. Um, like I said, it's free. It cost me money to have the video edited, but I'm trying to help. Uh, and so far the feedback's been good. So, with that said, um, what we were trying to build last night on Devleader live stream was the code commute landing page. So that spiel I just gave you about where to submit questions. The goal is that at codeccommute.com which currently just brings you to the YouTube channel. I want to put a Blazer website there and then it would have a form where you can basically uh submit your question anonymously. And I think that would be a a cool thing to build. Um helps me. It you know can make use of the landing page and and direct people there cuz right now it's just it's a redirect. It's kind of it's a little silly, I guess, but I wanted the domain, right?

So, the um the live stream sort of as I anticipated it didn't go well with uh using agents and stuff, but uh the reason I wanted to talk about it was because I think that like I want to take some responsibility for for how the live stream went because I think that it's a total copout if I'm just like oh like cursor just sucks and like you know therefore like look how silly it is. Sih silly it is. No one should use it. I can't even speak. Um and I I I sort of feel like my stream devolved into that and that wasn't my intention, right? I think I'm I'm happy that we got to see that, you know, using agents, using AI to go, you know, code something from scratch, it's not as like just trivial as people are making it. Um, like I was building stuff with two technologies that I'm not an expert in.

Like I'm uh I'm pretty advanced in C, but uh we were using Aspire and Blazer. Those are two things that I've used before. Uh like my blog is in Blazer. Um Brand Ghost, the product I'm building is not in Blazer, but we use Aspire. Um but I I think that there was a lot of like hiccups and roadblocks that uh uh even with you know the knowledge I have um someone else who's brand new probably would have been pretty screwed. But with that said um I was also screwing up. I feel like like this is the part I definitely want to take some responsibility for. Uh I was I was flustered. Right. So, the video that I was recording uh for code commute uh I Oh, man. I should have I should have scheduled for for today and I haven't done that yet. Um the timing doesn't probably make any sense to anyone watching this because when the videos go out is not the same time they're recorded.

But, uh I was, you know, I was flustered on the drive home trying to make sure that I can get home on time to stream it. and um my develop or my streaming setup, like my the computer I use for that's my gaming machine. Uh if you've seen some of the really early videos or if you've watched um I have I have yet another What's on my nose? Get out of here. Dry skin. Um you can feel it on my face. Uh I have a like a third YouTube channel. I haven't put a video up on it in a while, but it's a kind of like a weekly like diary entry, but when I was going through burnout, I just stopped recording it cuz I was burnt out. But on that, there's videos where I talk about all of the issues I had with my audio setup, my video setup.

So, I I just switched computers and my gaming machine's been pretty good for helping out with uh with that. my uh my laptop just like the audio issues were part of the sound card and I thought it was all of the hardware like uh the microphone or the preamp and stuff had nothing to do with that though. So I was just going in circles but that machine is not really set up for doing development work. So when I'm recording stuff for Dev Leader in Visual Studio, that's a barebones Visual Studio kind of setup just to let me be familiar enough to go write code like poke around blah blah blah. So it works. But I had just set up cursor on the weekend on that machine uh like Sunday night. Made sure that it was signed in so that I could, you know, use prompts and stuff.

Uh but like it I didn't even like uh to give you an example I didn't even check that we can't install the C uh uh devkit because that's blocked by Microsoft now and then like I was illprepared to like use VS Code on that machine. Um, so it was just like I was kind of all over the place because once once cursor wasn't working, we were like 40 minutes into, you know, an hour and 20 minute live stream and I'm like, okay, we got to we got to switch gears here cuz it's not working. Um, and I I didn't want to just have a live stream where it's like, oh well, look, this all sucks and waste everyone's time. I wanted to get to a point where we could show something, you know, some progress. So what had happened on the live stream is that far into it where things weren't working.

I closed cursor. I open up Visual Studio. I picked the project template to go make a blazer website. You can check a box that says like add Aspire support and literally pressed next and had the full solution ready. It had the Aspire project. It had um the Blazer project. For context, if you're not familiar with um with either of those, Blazer is a like a web framework that we have in .NET. So that C developers can use Razer pages and we can write C code as well. And that way for front-end development, yes, there's still HTML, yes, there's still CSS, but um we get familiar tools uh to use, which is super cool because yes, if you're, you know, a front-end dev and you're working in uh, you know, React, JavaScript, TypeScript, all the the fun familiar frontend stuff, like those are not things that I like developing in that I have a lot of experience developing in.

Um, brand ghost, you know, the thing I'm building on the side, the whole front end is in uh Nex.js JS and we use TypeScript. So I can get by. I can go modify stuff, but I'm not an expert by any means. Um, and so like I'm very fortunate that I have a team working with me, but if I had to go build it completely on my own, I would use Blazer for sure. And I would use it because that's the thing. I'm not saying it's the best technology. I'm just saying it would be the best for me if my team was only me. Man, what is this person? Slowest left turn in the universe. Not going to be driving behind them. So, Blazer is, you know, to help C developers work in the front end. Uh, so I I really like it. I think it's cool, but I don't spend a ton of time in Blazer and I'd love to spend more.

And Aspire, I have a really difficult time kind of conveying what Aspire does minimally, which is still really powerful. It gives you like a a dashboard to see your application. So, you can see metrics, you can see like tracing for requests coming in. You can hook up that tracing to your database. So, you can see a request come in and the life cycle as it like opens up connections to your database and stuff. Super cool. uh gives you like a this waterfall kind of view. Uh I think it's super awesome. You have your logging all in one spot. You can see um like health metrics. It's they just do such a good job with the dashboard alone. But um this is the part that's kind of hard for me to explain. Aspire also gives you the tools to basically write code and it helps replace like your YAML files for uh sort of like setting up your your cloud environment.

So you can say like I have a distributed application and I would like to use a database and you define that in code and when you go to deploy it in Azure for example it will go set up like your database as a resource for you. Um and I learned this yesterday. I didn't realize this but when you run it locally you can say like I want to use a Postgress database and it will go get the Docker container and run like Postgress on your machine. I didn't realize that. I thought we had to do more configuration. So, um I'm gonna talk I kind of fudged it up on the live stream, but I I spent a couple minutes after once I had some time to breathe and I was like, "Oh, man." Like I once I just set up the username and password, that's what was failing.

Um it was running a Docker instance. I looked at the console logs, it pulled the image down, it was running it. So for me, I think it's just a cool opportunity to try practicing more with Aspire brand ghost. We kind of put Aspire in after we had already deployed it to Azure. Everything was already set up and then we were like, hey, the Aspire dashboard alone is like faking awesome. We should just make sure that's wired up. And so we use the Aspire dashboard heavily. But we didn't use it for the um the cloud orchestration. So, I wanted to take advantage of that with the code commute landing page. So, that's the background. Um, but like I was saying, I was getting flustered. There was the point where we were trying to hook up um like the the environment variables. So, you can have the username and password for the database injected into the application.

And like this is a pretty trivial thing. and what I was screwing up in the live stream. And I like I feel this is the part like I feel embarrassed. I feel like stupid, but I feel like it's good to talk about this because this is just me being open and honest and that's the thing that I always want to make sure that I'm doing and accountable, right? So, I'll get to that. Um, but I was like opening up the app settings JSON file and I was in my head I'm like this isn't the right spot, but like why do I feel like I'm stuck here trying to put my environment variables here? And the the thing that I saw like right after the live stream was like there's a launch settings JSON file and I was like man like obviously that's that was the spot and I don't know why my brain just wouldn't it just wouldn't work and it's like I've done it a million times.

I know that's the spot I need to go put my environment variables in. Um so it was just like I felt stupid for for messing it up. So, you know, I spent a couple minutes after um and I had it working. But, you know, the other thing with the cursor part in the beginning, it was like I what I should have done was made like a new folder, but I didn't. So, it was trying to set up everything in my user name folder. So, like C drive users and then my username is just Nick on the computer. So, it was trying to set everything up like as that that was the the working directory. And then when it went to go add in the git support that was part of the the agent prompt, it started adding everything in my user folder to git because that's where it was setting things up.

So I was like, "Oh, no, no." Like we're not doing that on this stream. Uh so I had and because it's like showing it's adding all these files. So like I got to stop this thing. But that was kind of the point where I was like I'm very frustrated with what cursor is doing. it was running PowerShell and like every step was trying to it sent it looked like it was trying to send um like escape sequences and then it was like that's not supported and then you press like resume and it would try to rerun it a different way. So the whole thing was just like very very messy. And again, part of me is like I think it's good to show people that even someone who's been programming for like over 22 years, like it was rough. It was not straightforward. I know everyone's saying, "Oh, you know, I vibe coded like the most amazing thing in the universe in like 2 seconds." But like that's not how it worked.

What's this message coming in? Uh what's that? What's that all about? So, um, I'll explain this in just a moment. Actually, I have 7 minutes before I have to get on this call. So, let me let me talk about what I'm going to do. Um, I shouldn't be checking my phone while I'm driving. Sorry. Uh, I'm going to redo that live stream except I'm going to record it as a video. I I think I need to admit that um that was a little bit overwhelming for me to try and live stream and I was kind of defaulting and like I don't feel proud about this. I was kind of defaulting to just like poking fun at at Cursor and then like co-pilot was hallucinating. So, it was just easy for me to start pointing at those things and being like, "No, like clearly they're just pieces of shit." But like, you know, I have some responsibility in that.

And um I just don't think that I was operating at my best either. So, what I'd like to do and you know, I'm kind of like trying to publicly apologize. I realize like just a little live stream. It's not like I have like a million subscribers streaming to the universe. I'm not the primogen. Um, but I still like to publicly apologize for kind of um minimizing my responsibility in in that development and just pointing the finger at everything else. I don't think that was really fair. And uh instead of trying to live stream it again, because I I think that I will be overwhelmed again, instead of trying to live stream it, I'm just going to record myself doing it. And I'm going to build um the landing page.

I'm going to try to do the same thing that I was hoping, but this way if I if I need to pause for a break or I'm feeling like u I don't know, like I might be fine and not feel overwhelmed if I'm not streaming it. But I think when the camera's on and it's live, I I don't when I'm coding, I don't give myself enough grace that like I can screw up and then I get flustered and that doesn't feel so great. So, um just the reality. I feel like if I was coding with the camera on and a mic and then kind of just ignoring the audience and trying to pretend like you're just watching me code, um that wouldn't be so bad. But that's I don't like doing that. I I want to make sure I'm engaging with the audience.

But as a result, I have uh you know, I have to practice at streaming and and coding more, but uh I kind of feel like I like I need to entertain as well and not just code. So, I just don't think it was my best and I'm not proud of it and I just want to kind of uh make it right by delivering on the vibe coding part. So, I'm going to record it myself. I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to make a new folder. What I'm going to do this time and I'm going to Well, I'll probably try You know what? I don't even know if I feel comfortable with that. I don't know if I want cursor to um to set up the original project and it actually like it didn't take the instructions like it picked differentnet platforms or framework versions sorry and um it's not what I said so I I just don't trust it.

I think I'm going to I'll explain it in the video. I'm going to get things set up with the templates because it's like two clicks. It's it just works. And then I'm going to use cursor to vibe code the rest of uh the landing page. So I'll I'll post it on my main channel. I'll probably make like a community tab post on this channel to kind of share it out because I made a couple videos on this channel already talking about it. So just wanted to kind of wrap that up and say like sorry for a crappy live stream. I'm not not proud of it. Wanted to say sorry, take some responsibility and make it better. So, I'm going to wrap it up here because I got a couple minutes before I got to take this call. And yeah, so thanks for tuning in. And a friendly reminder because I don't have the landing page done yet.

Oops. Uh, if you have questions that you want answered about software engineering or career development, leave them below in the comments. Uh, otherwise, look for Dev Leader on social media and I'm happy to try my best to answer. If you send in your questions, then you'll be kept anonymous. And if you don't care and you just want to ask them in the comments, then it's already public. So, I can't really can't really hide you if you're commenting in public. So, thanks again and I will see you next time. Take care.