How to start vibe coding without compromising security with Jeff Malnick

Ru, did you want to kick off the vibe coding talk with Crash Course?

Yeah, let's do Crash Course.

Let's get in here.

So I think it's helpful for us to start off with definition of what vibe coding actually is before we unpack it a little bit more in Watchtower Weekly.

And I know that Jeff is going to go into greater detail in his interview later on.

At this point, you've probably heard the term vibe coding.

It's been out in the air for a while now.

It was named Word of the Year by the Collins Dictionary in 2025.

It's the process of leveraging an AI assistant to write software based on natural language prompts.

And the piece of it that is the vibe comes from the fact that, like, You get to communicate in whatever way is most comfortable to you.

You can talk to the chat bot.

You can talk to the large language model in sort of like your natural language.

And it will then turn that into software code that a computer can compile and run and understand.

Uh, so let's say that you want to build a new personal website with vibe coding.

You can describe that ideal website to an AI powered tool, and it'll then generate that code for you.

And afterwards you can edit the code if you need to, or you can go back and tell it, Hey, I want to change this.

I want this to look different.

The tool decides what code to write by drawing on open source code bases that were used to train its large language model.

And then behind the scenes, that LLM matches your prompt request to the code it's been trained on and then uses that to generate new code for your project.

You'll typically do all of this in an app like Codex or Cloud Code.

These provide built-in AI functionality.

Before we get deeper into this, I know I've been vibe coding my own projects.

If any of you have ever wanted to have an app that shows you Fahrenheit and Celsius at the same time, there's a great app that's on the App Store now called 40 Below.

You should go check it out.

There it is.

Ru, did you want to kick off the vibe coding talk with Crash Course?

Yeah, let's do Crash Course.

Let's get in here.

So I think it's helpful for us to start off with definition of what vibe coding actually is before we unpack it a little bit more in Watchtower Weekly.

And I know that Jeff is going to go into greater detail in his interview later on.

At this point, you've probably heard the term vibe coding.

It's been out in the air for a while now.

It was named Word of the Year by the Collins Dictionary in 2025.

It's the process of leveraging an AI assistant to write software based on natural language prompts.

And the piece of it that is the vibe comes from the fact that, like, You get to communicate in whatever way is most comfortable to you.

You can talk to the chat bot.

You can talk to the large language model in sort of like your natural language.

And it will then turn that into software code that a computer can compile and run and understand.

Uh, so let's say that you want to build a new personal website with vibe coding.

You can describe that ideal website to an AI powered tool, and it'll then generate that code for you.

And afterwards you can edit the code if you need to, or you can go back and tell it, Hey, I want to change this.

I want this to look different.

The tool decides what code to write by drawing on open source code bases that were used to train its large language model.

And then behind the scenes, that LLM matches your prompt request to the code it's been trained on and then uses that to generate new code for your project.

You'll typically do all of this in an app like Codex or Cloud Code.

These provide built-in AI functionality.

Before we get deeper into this, I know I've been vibe coding my own projects.

If any of you have ever wanted to have an app that shows you Fahrenheit and Celsius at the same time, there's a great app that's on the App Store now called 40 Below.

You should go check it out.

There it is.