Lucy Mac (🇬🇧 in 🇨🇴)

New blog post on @Hashnode 🚨 Do you often reach for flex: 1 in your CSS Flexbox layouts? In my latest post, I break down each part of this shorthand so that you can confidently build responsive layouts that work the way you intend 🤓 Link below 👇🏻

@hey_amandam Sorry to hear that Amanda. This keeps happening to so many talented people and it shouldn't. Sending a big hug 🫂

claude --dangerously-skip-permissions Thinking...✨✨ psql -c "DROP TABLE employees;" Anyway, I was affected by the layoffs at Block today. This was my dream role and team to join. You might think I was still onboarding but that's not how I roll. I dived in and had already designed and given internal facing AI enablement workshops, shipped automations for our team, shipped a new skill to generate a minimal agent context file based on newer trends of slimming context, and built an eval suite to show developers how to approach evaluating these changes. Anyway I'm bummed. And open to opportunities.

Incredible article from @Siddhant_K_code 🚀 "AI Fatigue is real" siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fat…

We're encapsulating all our knowledge of @reactjs & @nextjs frontend optimization into a set of reusable skills for agents. This is a 10+ years of experience from the likes of @shuding, distilled for the benefit of every Ralph

Ain't that the truth (from @ProfCalNewport's newsletter today "Forget Chatbots. You need a notebook.")

@benln Longshot, but Cali, Colombiaaaaaa 🇨🇴

Bring Cafe Cursor to your city We're taking over local cafes for a full day. Come build with the community, grab coffee and credits, and meet the team. Reach out to get involved.

@veggie_eric get someone else you know to introduce themselves to them and get their name

i need advice wat to do when you've forgotten someone's name but you've been acquaintances for long enough that it's way past the point where it's socially acceptable to ask them their name again

Still not over Kendrick Lamar's concert being cancelled in Bogota this weekend 🥹 We came from Cali, queued all day to then find out on Twitter at 8pm that it was cancelled 💔 Still no proper answers. But don't buy tickets for concerts at Vive Claro 💀 #ViveClaroNoCumple

I'm a bit late to the game but...

Been busy 🤭

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On Saturday, I MC'd for the very first time ever - hosting Creative Mornings Cali entirely in Spanish 🎤 Sometimes you just have to say yes to opportunities before you're ready 💫

@simpsoka @addyosmani oh I love this analogy!!!!!

This distinction is important. The Reddit post labeled it vibe coding, but what they described looked much closer to AI-assisted engineering: design docs, reviews, test cases, and all the scaffolding you expect in production work. That is very different from “throwaway weekend projects.” I think of it like photography. Vibe coding is the Polaroid. You point, prompt, and something develops. Sometimes it is magic, sometimes a blur. AI-assisted engineering is the DSLR. More deliberate, with the aperture and lenses in your hands. Both are creative, but one is structured for reliability and repeatability. I actually like vibe coding for prototypes. It lets me move quickly to test ideas and I rarely reuse that code anyway, whether AI wrote it or I did.

Vibe-coding is not the same as AI-Assisted engineering. A recent Reddit post described how a FAANG team uses AI and it sparked an important conversation about semantics: "vibe coding" and professional "AI-assisted engineering". While the post was framed as an example of the former, the process it detailed - complete with technical design documents, stringent code reviews, and test-driven development - is a clear example of the latter imo. This distinction is critical because conflating the two risks both devaluing the discipline of engineering and giving newcomers a dangerously incomplete picture of what it takes to build robust, production-ready software. As a reminder: "vibe coding" is about fully giving in to the creative flow with an AI (high-level prompting), essentially forgetting the code exists. It involves accepting AI suggestions without deep review and focusing on rapid, iterative experimentation, making it ideal for prototypes, MVPs, learning, and what Karpathy calls "throwaway weekend projects." This approach is a powerful way for developers to build intuition and for beginners to flatten the steep learning curve of programming. It prioritizes speed and exploration over the correctness and maintainability required for professional applications. There is a spectrum between vibe coding and doing it with a little more planning, spec-driven development, including enough context etc and what is AI-assisted engineering across the software development lifecycle. In stark contrast to the post, the process described in the Reddit post is a methodical integration of AI into a mature software development lifecycle. This is "AI-assisted engineering," where AI acts as a powerful collaborator, not a replacement for engineering principles. In this model, developers use AI as a "force multiplier" to handle tasks like generating boilerplate code or writing initial test cases, but always within a structured framework. Crucially, the big difference here is the human engineer remains firmly in control, responsible for the architecture, reviewing and understanding every line of AI-generated code, and ensuring the final product is secure, scalable, and maintainable. The 30% increase in development speed mentioned in the post is a result of augmenting a solid process, not abandoning it. For engineers, labeling disciplined, AI-augmented workflows as "vibe coding" misrepresents the skill and rigor involved. For those new to the field, it creates the false and risky impression that one can simply prompt their way to a viable product without understanding the underlying code or engineering fundamentals. If you're looking to do this right, start with a solid design, subject everything to rigorous human review, and treat AI as an incredibly powerful tool in your engineering toolkit - not as a magic wand that replaces the craft itself.

@CSDevAr It's so true. We should always appreciate what we have 💗

@codingwithlucy For good or bad indeed, which is a good reminder to keep you aware of the moment and the value of it :)

This is your reminder that your whole life can change in three months. Keep going 💗

@nazanin_ashrafi You got this, keep going 💗

@codingwithlucy Struggling with life and trying at the same time 💪

Nothing beats pen and paper 🧠🚀

@leerob @Jatinjindalj

@Jatinjindalj Will be on YouTube free!

That's a wrap! 🎉 Just finished filming a short course covering the foundational concepts you need to build software with AI tools. Models, tokens, context, tool calling, agents, hallucinations, and more!

@juliian41 Yeah Astro is super cool, I'm quite new to it but it seems really powerful. They wanted to add Sanity and the current site had a lot of technical debt and interactivity, so original person who built the site recommended to move to next.js

@codingwithlucy For learning purposes, why the migration? Astro seems powerful and reliable enough for content driven sites

It's been a long time since I've had full on 8-9 hour coding days and I am loving it 🤩 Feels so good to be deep in the problem and super focused 🧠 Current project: Migrating legacy Astro site over to Next.js + Sanity ⚡️

I think I'm enjoying it more because I know that it's temporary (my client have asked me to temporarily ramp up my hours while doing the migration) 😎