Explaining The Vibes

A few months ago, I wrote a post making the case that AI should be seen in terms of “bionic arms,” in terms of what it helps us lift.

I wanted to sort of explain what I’m talking about by way of example.

Recently, I’ve been trying to improve my workflow, because I often find myself getting bogged down in trying to manage the process of posting. It feels like I have one too many steps for whatever reason. I’m often copying and pasting back and forth through interfaces, which turns the process of uploading a post into something that can take upwards of an hour to do.

A big part of this is just age and complexity. Tedium is a decade-old site with a lot of elements under the hood that need to orchestrate together. But yet there is still too much in the process that is manual. Uploading images remains a huge pain in the butt, especially when I have a dozen of them in a single post.

I have coded various tools over the years to help improve my life. My most famous one was a backend interface that allowed me to copy and paste the full HTML of a newsletter directly into my email tool of choice, essentially neutralizing the most labor-heavy part of a newsletter distribution process.

But now I’m sort of feeling like I’m getting overwhelmed by the uploading part, and not in a good way. It’s an interface I built in Craft CMS, and after six years of using it, it’s finally bogging me down. (I think part of it is that the Markdown-based plugin I’ve been using, Doxter, hasn’t seen any real UX changes in quite some time, a side effect of its original author giving it up. Great tool—just a bit dated at this point.)

I came up with a solution, and yes, it involves a bionic arm. But I’ve specifically designed it to only really be useful for my own specific use case at this time.

How I turned my markdown editor into a CMS-posting tool

One way I’m approaching this is via Obsidian. I was very skeptical of Obsidian at first, because it was sold as a mind-mapping tool, which doesn’t feel like what I actually need from a writing standpoint. But what I have realized is that its actual magic is not in the mind-mapping but its extensibility. It is essentially a Chromium-based editing tool, similar to iA Writer, but it can be upgraded in a variety of creative ways.

I’ve recently been experimenting with it by testing a social thread uploading tool, inspired by an existing open-source plugin for Mastodon. After the creator rejected my idea to add Bluesky capabilities, I decided to experiment with that concept myself, along with some additional features like drip functionality, so you’re not posting the whole thread at once, but posting it gradually. It is not really in a releasable form at the moment (for one thing, it doesn’t currently save your tokens on reload), but it has been a fun experiment that I’ve been using for my commissioned searches.

That’s cool, but what if I could use Obsidian to solve my CMS workflow problems? And what using a bionic arm was the way?

I’m a member of the private content marketing community Superpath, which is run by Jimmy Daly, a friend of mine who was a coworker a solid 13 years ago, and he’s gotten really into vibe coding lately. He held a whole workshop for it, where many people decided to work on things like portfolio sites or internal tools.

My aspiration was different: I wanted to make it possible to post my content into Craft CMS from Obsidian, removing a step from my workflow. I would use vibe coding to plug into the existing GraphQL system that my platform already uses to post content to the static site generator Eleventy.

The thing about Craft CMS that makes it really valuable is not so much the posting interface, but its content schema, which can be modified at will and used to build any sort of content structure you can think of. It is solid enough that I plan to keep it around. But if I just want to put some content into it, why not just use the tool I already like for writing?

As for what I built: While a lot of purely vibe-coding tools exist out there, along with stuff that plugs directly into VS Code, I’ve found Anthropic’s Claude to strike the right balance. Beyond the model itself, it has added a lot of capabilities that make it a good option for amateur coders, including the ability to organize complicated ideas into projects. It even attaches to GitHub if you want it to have a lay of the land.

And with it, I built a tool that allows me to upload directly to my CMS, images and all. (It can even upload from a URL, rather than a file I downloaded, saving time.) It works, which I can prove by the fact that you’re reading this.

(That said, I can’t say everything was perfect. At one point, I mentioned Dashboard Confessional, which created a tendency by the various Claude LLMs to reference early 2000s emo bands and songs when working on various things. A funny bit, even for a chatbot, but at one point it tried to claim “How You Remind Me” was an emo song, which was nearly enough to make me give up on this entire project.)

This is a situation where LLMs helped me solve a “me” problem without getting in the way of anyone else. I’m not going to be using LLM-created copy or images. But I did just figure out a way to save myself a ton of time when uploading a post, which I hope will make it easier to do so over time.

Build your own guardrails

A pal of mine, Matt Lee, recently put this AI discussion into a great context that I find hard to disagree with: “AI should be a laserdisc you can buy, not a thing that drowns us all.”

The problem with AI, much like prior tech industry hype cycles like Web3 or blockchain, is that everyone is trying to figure out how to have another Web 2.0 with this trending technology. But what if its role is something that can be compartmentalized? What I would love to see is the rise of AI that stays in your house, maybe even on a dedicated LLM machine. It doesn’t go to the cloud or siphon off content, but it can load models that help you solve complicated problems.

The issue is that a lot of this technology is being built at scale, and it is being done thoughtlessly. If you’re going to use it, put some thought into it. Put barriers between what makes sense for your needs.

The nice thing about AI being a package you buy rather than a tool infused in literally everything is that it puts it into a context that makes sense. The problem is not that this technology exists. It’s that it gets used haphazardly and in inappropriate ways.

I encourage you to figure out the right approach for your needs.