Vibe coding is something anyone can pick up, as long as you can type or talk. It doesn't guarantee a perfect output, but it requires no alchemical knowledge -- only patience.
Just talk to your AI chatbot with instructions for what you want to create, and it'll get to coding. Then test it out and continue iterating until you're happy with your project. That's vibe coding at its most simple.
I've played around with vibe coding quite a bit, creating random projects here and there. I've mostly tried it out for proof of concept or chatbot testing, but rarely to make something crucial or functional enough to use daily.
Then I began looking for an e-reader device and walked away frustrated by how incredibly "dumb" most of them are, especially Kindles. More on that later.
Regardless of the motivation (but mostly in defiance of Amazon), it prompted me to try to vibe code a fix, but with a twist. I wanted to see if I could vibe code a functional e-reading application with all the features I wanted. Knowing that even if I got this thing up and running, I likely wouldn't use this daily, but I wanted to add some flair.
The question became what AI chatbot to use. I tested three -- Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT -- to create what I wanted and then see which produced better results.
The prompt
Comparing chatbots is hard, especially when trying to mimic the same conversation or vibe in a coding project. Believe me, I've tried. I wanted to make sure all the tools I tested used the same prompt, but first, I wanted to refine it to get the best results, so I came up with a strategy to help me do that.
First, I built the entire project from the ground up with Gemini. Once I liked where the project was (a successful, functional proof of concept), I asked it to create a prompt so I could add it to any other chatbot. Gemini generated the prompt, I saved it as a file, and I uploaded it to Claude. I went through this process again, allowing Claude to catch and fix things I hadn't thought about when building the project and Gemini. Once that process was complete, I asked it to create another prompt so I could add it to ChatGPT.
The idea was to have all three chatbots contribute to the actual creation of the project and, in turn, to the final prompt. Once the prompt was created, I uploaded it to all three chatbots in a separate chat to see how consistently they performed.
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