"You think some fancy autocomplete can emulate this style?" Hold my beer!

Woo, boy. This one is going to get weird. And kinda personal, I guess.

So, I closed out a recent post with "And, no, AI was not used to create any part of this post. Pfft! You think some fancy autocomplete can emulate this style? Not on my budget!" 

Fast forward to a smoke break some days later and I thought, "Ya know, I haven't actually tried it in the past few years. LLMs have gotten a great deal better since then. Maybe we give it another go?" 

Because, yeah, I did give this a go around 2023. To say it didn't work would be an understatement. But this is 2026 (for better and worse)! I just vibe coded an entire line of recipe apps (pre-order Sauce Hero and Sausage Hero now!)  and I know a TON more about how Chatty McGPT works. What if... Hmm...

We need a Soul. 

Vibe Coding a Recipe App or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot

Vibe coding. Programming via natural speech using AI. Everyone's buzzing about it. You see it all over social media. But how much is real and how much is content creator swill or bot blogging? 

Let's find out!

We're going with Cursor on this one.  It's an AI 'assisted' programming IDE based on Visual Studio Code (Didn't realize VS Code was open source!). Forget about assistance, we're 100% putting R2D2 to work on this!

We'll be running on the Free tier, of course, and using default setup. Free apparently gets you "...for evaluation and light usage. You can perform up to 2,000 code completions and 50 premium model requests per month, with monthly resets."

How much is this, exactly? Pfft! Beats me. Cursor also supports bringing your own API keys, so maybe we can plug it into OpenRouter/Free if the pond dries up. We'll see.

 Anyways, let's rock!

Pro Tip: Make the AI RTFM

 As y'all know, I love experimenting with whatever new tech that happens to be floating around on the 'net for free. This means a ton of web searching and, nowadays, chatting with bots to learn lingo, limitations, and liabilities. This takes a ton of time and typing before I finally get going on whatever toy I'm trying to play with. Chatbots sometimes help and sometimes hinder, especially on new or rapidly evolving software, just like search queries. Have you seen how much todos about Photoshop have changed over the years?! The problem with the bots is, eventually, they just kinda go crazy. 

So, to get better bot interactions, we need to do two things: We need to get it to Read The F%$*ing Manual ('cause, let's face it, you won't). Then, we need to make sure to wipe it's brain between tasks.