Vibe Coding at Lakeside

AI has been a hot topic in recent years, and many people have a negative perception of AI, but it can accomplish many great things. Vibe coding is one of them. To help explain this wondrous creation and its impact on students in the Lakeside Community, I interviewed Zane D. E. (7th grade) and Yiyang L. (8th grade), two passionate vibecoders.

Let's start with a simple question. What is vibe coding?  Well, “vibe coding” is a term in software development that refers to using AI tools to generate code rather than writing code manually. While you might think this is cheating, vibe coding allows for the average, beginning coder to complete large, complex projects in a short amount of time. Additionally vibe coding offers an easy way for people to get into code development.

One of the biggest cross-grade projects that has been made in the Lakeside community using vibe coding is Yap-Window. Yap-Window is a chatting platform similar to Discord or Slack that was entirely made by Lakeside students using the help of AI. According to Yiyang L., one of Yap-Window’s head developers, “I would never have been able to make and complete Yap-Window without the help of AI.” Yap-Window has about 9,000* lines of code, equivalent to coding Tetris nine times. With minimal levels of coding experience, this task would be close to impossible.

This year, AI has been guard-railed by the Lakeside Middle School web filters because of equity problems involving paid software and misuse of the AI. This has had an unintentionally large impact on the Lakeside vibe coding community. Zane expressed his opinions on this topic, saying, “I think that the ban of AI might be doing some good things, but I think in general it's just blocking a lot of things that I would normally be doing during lunch... because I can't vibe code, I just end up [goofing off during lunch].” Zane and Yiyang’s alternative plan is to vibe code on their home computers, but they can’t use them during school hours.

Contrary to popular belief, vibe coding can help you learn how to code. When asked if vibe coding taught them how to code, Yiyang responded, “Definitely, because I didn't know any JavaScript at the start, and then I looked at what the AI had written for me and then fixed any bugs that I saw, and now I understand more about JavaScript.” And although Zane said it didn’t directly teach him any coding language, he stated,  “I learned how Android Studio works to make a very simple Android app with a web view for a web app that I made.”

Vibe coding is really easy to get into. First, think about something you’ve always wanted to make, a game or a project. Next, pick an AI model. Some recommendations from Yiyang and Zane were: DeepSeek, Claude, and Grok Code. Then, pick a coding studio; my favorites are Replit, VSCode, GitHub, and Zane suggests Cursor. Lastly, and most importantly, HAVE FUN!

Thank you to Zane D. E. and Yiyang L. for letting me interview them.

*The total number of lines is 35433. There are 9204 lines of code, and 16,409 lines in the chat database, 9820 lines from answers to 24.