I tried Vibe Coding properly for the first time on a real project — an Angular frontend talking to a headless CMS, using Gemini Code Assist throughout. Here’s what actually happened.

Context matters more than the prompt box.

The chat interface alone wasn’t enough for anything non-trivial. What worked was writing the feature requirements in a .md file - structured, specific, with field names, API contracts, and expected behaviour - and feeding that as context. The generated code went from generic scaffolding to something I could actually use. Side effect: those .md files become reasonable first-draft documentation too.

Continue reading

Four and a half years working with Indonesian organisations on Google Cloud has given me a front-row seat to how decisions actually get made.. and how rarely the data behind those decisions is any good. During the pandemic, I watched businesses scramble to make calls with incomplete information. That stuck with me.

The specific problem I kept running into: surveys and feedback mechanisms produce shallow data. Static questionnaires get gamed, abandoned, or answered on autopilot. The signal is weak. Generative AI changes what’s possible here - a conversational agent can probe, clarify, and adapt in ways a form never could.

Continue reading