This year, I’ve taken a plunge into vibe coding and have really sunk my teeth into a few projects. First I built a few tools to do specific tasks, both administrative-type items and discrete parts of our legal workflow. Then I’ve taken on a more ambitious task to construct a custom backend for the law firm. The administrative tools became features, we’ve migrated into a centralized tool for tracking everything, and there is a reports dashboard in place that shows me the information I want to see. We’re also making some significant upgrades to our project management type work that will save time and mental energy once completed and will be responsive to a number of client requests we’ve received in recent months.

Right now, though, while almost all of the bones of my initial vision are in place, only parts of the system are working as intended. At the start basically nothing worked correctly, and that was frustrating and disappointing. As I’ve never developed software before this, I’d never dealt with the period of bug fixes that is an integral part of the process. I also wasn’t building in a sandbox but with our actual workplace, something that isn’t best practices but there were backups of everything and guardrails in place so I took the risk. Almost every day, for several weeks now, I’ve made bug fixes. Some days it’s just a couple of things that went wrong; other days it’s entire functions that broke. It seems like we’ve turned a corner, but some of the most ambitious features are the ones that still have kinks that need to be worked out. Nobody talked about this part when vibe coding first became all the rage.

While it will never be enterprise-grade software, it is already making certain things easier and will improve our operations and expand our capabilities even more once fully built out. Building this has also forced me to learn things like how to set up a virtual cloud server and engage in systems thinking in a manner I’ve enjoyed. I’m unlikely to stop building things once this project is in a sufficiently good place; I already have ideas for what could come next. Yes, it is a little addictive. But only when things work. It’s very frustrating when they don’t, and that’s why this stage is called integration hell.