Vibe Coding Synths
Andrej Karpathy came up with the term Vibe Coding to describe writing software by giving AI assistants control of the detail of the code, the programmer only works at the level of text description.
As a mediocre programmer, I find this appealing. (I do have decades of experience to offset the mediocrity).
I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of years using AI assistants to help me with Semantic Web/AI projects. This has been quite the learning experience... I haven't been fully vibe coding - I have gone hands-on with the code quite a lot. But I've been using Node.js, which I'm reasonably familiar with, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the domain. Overall I've found the approach very productive.
So I decided to see how far I could get with synth building, using a similar approach. I'm fairly lousy with the necessary languages, but by adopting a mostly-vibe approach, I've got all the way. I've made sound generators/processors in the following formats:
- In-browser Javascript
- lv2 plugins (the Linux user's VSTs)
- Native Linux - including Raspberry Pi
- Embedded - targeting Daisy Seed (with an ESP32 design in-progress)
That's an ordered list for a reason. While the earlier items are (kinda) complete standalone projects, they've also acted as prototypes for the designs later in the list.