Building hobby projects with AI
A Stupid bubble
Yay someone writing about AI - Said nobody ever, or well very few people. Unfortunately I felt the same way for a long time, while I do like to read about the technicalities of it all - I was getting sick and tired of everything being about AI these days. Technically I still am. But as with many things in life I feel like just disliking something without any solid basis of understanding is neither a great place to be in or a great stance to have.
Copilot (No coding)
Used at work but just for generating API spec scaffolding and sequence diagrams
Mistral, Claude and Speckit
I heard and read about Github Speckit when it was originally announced and was intrigued, this turned vibe coding into more spec driven design if anything. After procrastinating on it for a while (as one does) I wanted to give it a try. As I feel quite passionately about using European software if possible I first got a month sub at Mistral who just introduced their CLI coding agent “Vibe” to use with their coding specific Devstral model. While Devstral works fine for writing basic scripts and such it didn’t yield quite the results I was hoping for based on what I’d been seeing people make with the codex and claude code agents. Especially so because it ended up being the case that speckit wasn’t actually supporting Mistral Vibe yet! So after a few days of playing around with vibe I decided to give claude code a go. And oh my what a difference that made! I read a lot of good things about Claude Code but wasn’t really sure what to expect while working with it.
My workspace is a simple WSL workspace in VScode which I then terminal in to as well to run claude code in after initialising speckit. So essentially I keep the file browser on the side, then 30% of the screen to review code and the rest for the terminal to use claude code in.
