Vibe Coding

I've picked up these ideas from personal experiences, reading, and conversations along the way. They're not necessarily my own ideas, but they've helped me, and I hope they can help you too.

Terminology

These days, vibe coding usually refers to the folks who prompt their way through a codebase. The ones who jam with some flavor of chat assistant and build apps using nothing but English and good energy.

But for me, vibe coding started way earlier. I think it was back in 8th grade—about 15 years ago—when I first saw a somekind of a vibe coder in action. I can still picture him: a high schooler from the science class at my school, earphones in, completely immersed. Just him, the PC, and lines of code flowing in.

My fellow high-schooler wasn’t some prodigy or coding expert—he was just a kid who was fully dialed in. He cared about what he was doing. He understood the tools he was using. And most importantly, he looked competent.

It was then when i tought, here is someone who codes and vibe along the way. he looks like a vibe coder!

A Real Vibe Coder

But everything changed a year ago.

Yesterday—April 9th, 2025—marked the one-year anniversary of ThePrimeagen going full-time as a streamer. And exactly one year ago, I came face to face with the ultimate form of the vibe coder I first saw back in high school.

Ten seconds into his first stream, and boom—he’s switching screens, hopping between terminals, writing and running code at lightning speed. And all of it while cracking jokes and talking with Twitch chat like it’s no big deal.

That’s when it hit me: This guy is *really* vibing when he codes.

But how?

How does he make it look so easy? So fun? So effortless?

Digging Deeper

By then, I could immediately recognize the setup: Prime was using Neovim, Tmux, a tiling window manager, and Zsh. But that wasn’t all—far from it.

You could tell this guy had taken it to another level. He was using his own custom plugins, written in Lua, crafted specifically to boost his productivity and streamline his flow.

That’s when I made a decision:

I want to really vibe like Prime.

So I set myself to the task. I started following his work, diving into his streams, learning from every tool, tip, and tangent he shared.

Small disclosure: I don’t know him personally. This isn’t some sponsored shoutout.

This is just a love letter to a developer who genuinely inspired me.

 Check out this video on developer productivity that helped kick it off for me.

Don’t chase the vibes.
Build them.