Co-designing a sparse music codec with ChatGPT o3

I've tried getting ChatGPT to write blog posts for me as well, but it seems to struggle with knowing which things are important and which things aren't. You need to apply a lot of editorial control.

For example:

> We swapped 3 × 3 windows for 5 × 5, removed global gains then re-introduced per-occurrence magnitudes, and replaced hard clamping with bilinear interpolation so gradients would flow

What does this stuff mean? Why mention these very specific details in the middle of a very high-level overview?

Obviously ChatGPT said this because there was a part in your conversation where you decided to make these changes, but without any of the context behind that it is meaningless to readers.

Normally I'd never write small projects in languages I'm unfamiliar with, or learn how to do Android app development just to fix a minor issue with an open-source app, but pair coding with claude code has made these things much more achievable. Vibe coding quickly goes off the rails towards garbage outputs of course, but I've found actually reviewing and guiding the quality of the work piece-by-piece can work with the right effort.

There was a very cool small hardware project posted here some time ago, I forgot what it was, where the creator admitted that he had almost no prior experience doing hardware design/build, but pushed through it solo with LLM assistance far enough to get some pretty impressive outputs.

So, in a couple of evenings (with already having a working PoC evening one) I managed to basically replicate a Zed AI-like integration as a Goland plugin (much less polished and feature-rich, but covering exactly what I need).

I've never written kotlin nor a jetbrains plugin before, and since what I wanted is quite complex, it would've easily taken me 1-4 weeks full-time work otherwise - which is to say I would've never done it. It required a ton of grepping around the intellij-community repo too, to see what is available, and what existing patterns are (all done by the AI of course).

In this case I vibe coded it (I deem it fine for side-projects, not for production work of course) with Claude Code and it cost me ~$100 all in all, while I was mostly chilling / gaming. Later stages definitely required me to read the code and understand it, since as you say, vibe coding falls apart at a certain point pretty drastically. But having a working skeleton (and code I can modify instead of authoring from scratch) I could easily polish it to sufficient stability.

All in all, a pretty magical experience, and I now use my new plugin all day. Not only amazing bang for buck, but just enabling me to do side projects that I otherwise just wouldn't have the time nor want to put in the effort to do.