I recently completed a course from Brad Traversy at Traversy Media called Coding with AI.
I was looking to move beyond chatting with AI for my “vibe coding” sessions and into something a bit more structured. Up to this point, most of what I was building had to fit inside the limits of tools like Claude or ChatGPT in a browser. It worked, but as projects got larger and more complex, the cracks in that workflow started to show, especially if this was going to be more than just a weekend experiment.
I had dabbled with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and early versions of Claude Code, but quickly realized I wasn’t ready for them yet. Or maybe I just didn’t need that level of horsepower. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to give up that much control. Likely a mix of all three.
That shift, from chatting with AI to working with it inside VS Code, sounds small. And technically, it is. But it changes how you work more than you think. It comes down to the difference between what the course calls “vibe coding” and AI-assisted coding. I’ll get into that distinction in a bit.
This isn’t a course review, but I liked it enough to go through it twice. Once using Claude Code, and again using Codex. Same material, different tools, slightly different experience each time.
And that’s what got me thinking. Where’s the line between vibe coding and AI-assisted coding? More importantly, where do I actually sit on that spectrum, and what do I gain by moving out of the chat window and into VS Code?
Continue reading “From Chat to VS Code: Somewhere Between Vibe Coding and AI-Assisted Coding”This isn’t a course review, but I liked it enough to go through it twice.
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