Okay, so for the final part of day one of week one, I want to take you through the scene,
the what is this all about anyway? And it begins with this tweet that is again from Andre. I
mentioned that he's the guy that coined the term vibe coding, and this is his seminal tweet from
some time ago, from like more than a year ago, announcing this idea that he calls vibe coding,
where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace the exponentials, and forget that code even exists.
And he describes LLMs getting too good. So he goes through this idea that you sort of give up
looking at all of the code, you ask an LLM to generate something and you let it be and come
back and see it doing what it does. And this really gave rise to the to the term vibe coding
and to everything that transpired in 2025. And the year ahead was then something of an emotional
roller coaster. I feel like initially people were quite surprised by what these things could do.
And then there was a period of sort of denial when everyone pushed back a bit. And then
astonishment we all went through when we tried it ourselves and saw what could really happen.
But then that was replaced by a sense of frustration that some things weren't working
out. And to be honest, then real anger. Like I said on one of my courses before that there was a
point when I found myself getting so frustrated with code code that I was I was starting to
yell at it and ask it to write performance reports. So I would have it read in about the
repeated mistakes it was making. It was some strange thing where you would have such an
identity with the AI you're working with that it could become extremely frustrating. And then
there was a period of acceptance when with the people that were using this every day like myself
started to get familiar with where is it good and where is it weak and how do we make the most out
of the strengths without getting frustrated by some of some of the downsides of working
with AI code generators. But then there was something of an inflection point late 2025
with I guess Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Claude Opus 4.5 more like that I think that was the
real inflection point followed by Gemini 3 and GBC 5.2 when suddenly these AI agents got a lot
better and a lot of the of the anger and frustration it's still times when I get impatient
and when I get irritated but there's much less of the super frustrating repeated mistakes that
we used to see earlier last year. And a lot of us have seen this inflection point and that really
caused in sort of December and January this huge new wave of progress and this ability to do so
much with AI agents. And the terminology around this space is still something that's up in the
air. You hear people using different expressions to mean different things. As I say the first one
was vibe coder which was Andre's term and sometimes people just mean that is a sort of
quite amateurish approach of just sort of letting something go and then throwing it away if it
doesn't work or trying it again. For some people vibe coding is just just the name of this whole
field. Then vibe engineer was this term that Simon Willison I'll show you some of his posts later
he came up with this term to represent the more professional side of it of actually building
software as a professional but using AI agents. And then a new term that sort of emerged for people
using this as experts is an agentic coder. That is someone that is using things like the cursor
agent that we just saw as a sort of sidekick to collaborate with to build a product together
or potentially multiple agents as we will. All right I don't want to confuse you horribly I
just want to mention though that these words can mean different things depending on their context
and it's a bit of a muddle. When I say agentic coder on this course us together for the next
three weeks I'm referring to using agents to help you code but you may also hear someone saying
agentic coder referring to a coder someone like you and me as well who's building AI agents that
could be an agentic coder. Now that's confusing and also when you hear people talking about
platforms like Claude Code and Cursor you can sometimes call those platforms coding agents.
They are agents that write code. So depending on which way around these words are and the context
they use they could mean different things. So the the key point here is that if in doubt ask the
person you're talking to to clarify what exactly are you talking about. When you say agentic coder
are you talking about someone that codes with the assistance of AI agents because if so that's what
you and I are going to be doing together. All right what if that hasn't completely confused you
what I now want to do is go through some coding agents with you some of the platforms where we
can work with agents. There are three different surfaces three different ways that we can interact
with these coding agents. One of them is using an IDE an integrated development environment
a product like Cursor which has windows and menus and panes. One of them is using a plugin an
extension typically it's something which which is bolted on to VS Code a super popular open source
IDE and you can get extensions to it which allow you to work within VS Code but be using an AI
agent. And then famously the third way which which was sort of invented by Claude Code is using what's
called a CLI a command line interface and this is where you're sort of working within a terminal
you're working within something that looks like it's it's come from the 80s you're working in
something like a black screen with characters and it's a bit retro but it's turned out to be
such an interesting interactive way to work with agents that it kind of it was almost came up as an
accident through Claude Code there was a side project for a while that then just blew up and
now everyone is doing it and so this idea of sort of stepping back to the way things used to work in
this retro style interface has turned out to be super productive and just a really powerful way
to work and and as as you will see yourself. And so to give some examples of these for IDEs there's
Cursor, there is Codex from OpenAI, Antigravity from Google and Windsurf is another popular one.
When it comes to plugins the one that comes to mind the most is GitHub Copilot incredibly popular
and that is also available as an extension inside VS Code and that's a very common way to use it
and when it comes to CLI there is of course Claude Code and because of the success of Claude Code
a lot of the others built CLI versions kind of taking a leaf out of Claude Code's book
there's Cursor CLI, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and then there are also a couple of others we'll look at
OpenCode and AMP and there are a bunch of others too a lot of people have jumped on the CLI bandwagon
because it's been super popular and I want to make the point that this is a space that is moving
so fast and there's plenty of ambiguity in terms of the terms for things give you an example
Claude Code itself has an extension a plugin to VS Code and Cursor so that way you could perhaps
say that Claude Code isn't just a CLI it's also a plugin but that's just a bit confusing that's
that's more of a footnote the main point is that Claude Code is primarily a CLI interface. I will
keep the resources updated so if in doubt check out the resources or ask me a question if you want
me to clarify a new tool or something that's happening look that there is there are new tools
coming up all the time one of the hardest things in this space is being able to separate the signal
from the noise there is this tsunami of information that's coming pounding at us every single day
my social media feeds are just filled with new announcements and new excitement and being able
to distinguish between the true excitement like when Claude Code was released last year
separate from the sort of the talk of the town this week that will fizzle in a few weeks
there's a real skill to that and if in doubt then of course ask me that's what I'm here for
but try to develop that skill to not get distracted by all of the noise in the space
focus on the true value on things like Claude Code