Vibe coding without being a coder: one writer’s honest take
Howard Armitage is not a software engineer. His background is Microsoft certifications from the 1990s and an electro-acoustic music degree. He describes himself plainly: his brain does not work like a coder’s. That makes what he built recently worth paying attention to.
Armitage wanted a custom wake word for Home Assistant’s AI voice assistant. The default, “OK Nabu,” never felt right. He’d tried training a custom word before and quit when it didn’t work. This time, using AI-assisted development, he shipped it. The assistant now answers to “Hey Yaffle.”
What Vibe Coding Actually Looked Like in Practice
The project touched Python scripts, TensorFlow models, ESPHome firmware, and multiple terminal windows. Armitage didn’t engage with any of that directly. His description of the workflow is the clearest operator-level account of vibe coding you’ll read: explain the problem, discuss approaches, test the result, discover what broke, feed it back, iterate.
The conversation was always about the problem, never about the syntax. He describes the experience as having “an impossibly talented senior programmer” next to him for the cost of a monthly AI subscription. Not one who always got things right, but one who could explain unfamiliar concepts, write code, and iterate without frustration.
The Pattern He’s Seen Before
Armitage draws a direct line between vibe coding and what happened to professional musicians when DAWs like Cubase arrived in the 1990s and 2000s. Skilled Photoshop artists watched AI remove complex backgrounds with one click. Writers watched grammar checkers become writing assistants. Graphic designers watched templates become design platforms.
His read: this is not gatekeeping when experienced developers push back. If you spent years mastering software engineering, architecture, debugging, and security, watching AI lower the barrier to entry would feel exactly as it did for professional musicians when the bedroom became the recording studio. He acknowledges the concern as legitimate.
What Linus Torvalds Said
Armitage notes that Linus Torvalds, creator and lead maintainer of Linux, weighed in on the debate. Torvalds called AI “clearly a useful” tool and said the challenge is making sure it helps maintainers rather than simply creating more work for them. Armitage treats that as a pragmatic signal, not hype.
The Operator Takeaway
The Yaffle project did not start with the ambition to become a programmer. It started with a small Home Assistant tweak, which led to another, which eventually led to VSCodium and AI-assisted development. Each problem looked solvable because the last one got solved.
If you have been curious about vibe coding but assumed it requires some baseline of programming knowledge, Armitage’s account suggests the floor is lower than the Reddit debates imply. The tool stack he ended up using (TensorFlow, ESPHome, Python) is genuinely non-trivial. He got there anyway by staying focused on the problem, not the language.
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