Do you use vibe coding tools?
Is it just me, or have tools like Google Antigravity become an essential part of what you do with your community?
I think FluentCommunity and FluentCRM are amazing, better than anything else that I have tried, and my community is flourishing partly because of the brilliance of these tools. I would not be able to code anything like it. But around the edges, vibe coding has and is adding just those little extra touches that MY use case needs.
I would not want to release these extra plugins as I couldn't maintain them to other people's satisfaction and use cases... but they provide the extra sauce that I need... specific metrics and analytics that I need to know which courses are being accessed the most, and when, and for surveys and forms that work the way that I want them to work (screenshot above) within my community and many other things like the ability to lock or unlock specific lessons, not just sections.
Sure, I have to spend extra tokens running them through security checks (another reason I would not want to make them public!), but it seems this sort of way of working is becoming doable for average people like me who know a little code but don't have that much time to give to it - because I want to focus on what I do and love and build a community around it, not become a coder.
I wonder who else is working like this, how is it helping you, and what you are using it for?
I just setup Claude Code last week and it is pretty cool so far. I've been wanting to create an add-on for a forms tool (not FluentForms) for a couple years but never had the time to do it. As my first test with Claude Code, I had a working add-on in about 2 hours. Pretty cool.
Thomas Oates and are you a coder by background?
Paul Hopkins No...yes...not really...kinda yes. 😀
I got a college degree in Computer Science (Software Development) a really long time ago but I've never had a full-time job as a developer/coder. My career has mainly been on the IT admin/management side of things but I've always done coding at every job I've had mainly to help with the admin/mgt side of things and because I enjoy doing it. So, I've done lots of coding over the years but never really focused on it 100%.
Thomas Oates so yes, the answer is just yes. You are a coder by background
Claude Code is my favorite junior developer. 80% of what he does is perfect, but I still need to keep an eye on the rest (sometimes makes really odd, over complicated decisions). There are a lot of great skills that help with that, too.
What I do find amazing is using NotebookLM + Claude Code inside VS (It's easier to track what it's doing) + Cowork. I use NotebookLM to load in all the API docs, then when I want to do something, I chat with it and have it create a checklist for me. Then I give the checklist to Claude VS to implement (and push to GitHub for me). Once it's done, I have Cowork go and test everything for me (even easier now with their new Chrome extension).
While I don't make the majority of my income from dev work anymore, I have picked up several projects recently (I disclose I use AI) to make some good extra pocket money.
Wendy Perkins Shoef What you wrote here is Greek to me, as a real newbie. I've been using Claude (pro version) for a couple of (full) days and it's rubbish. Confidently generates plugins without troubleshooting them first; doesn't take much of my input and whatever it asks me to do into consideration to improve the next version so I end up activating and deactivating dozens of plug-ins everyday that either don't work at all, or do half of the job, or (more recently), work well only in the desktop version (ruins the phone UI).
Anne-Sophie W you have to know how to develop a little bit and write code otherwise you don't know if it's hallucinating. If you ask it what's 2*2, you know the answer and if it's wrong you can tell. AI will make mistakes frequently. That's why it's a good junior developer.
If you don't know how to develop, you won't know when it's making mistakes.
As far as making a plugin, you will want to give it basically everything upfront in the opening prompt. Ideally you'd have a document with the full plan. If you use VS,I like creating the project plan with Gemini first and then Claude to develop .
Depending on how complex a project you may need to use opus instead of sonnet (especially if you don't know when it's making errors). Otherwise the model won't be able to hold all the pieces of the project scope. It will lose the context as the conversation continues. The planning document will help prevent that.
Whatever you do with claude, do not get upset and say "dont come back to me until youve fixed the problem (in my case it was Dark mode Css formatting for a specifc class), it took little longer to fix the issue. But because it was "scared" lol, it looked up my site xml file from filezilla, decoded the password, and uploaded via SFTP without asking. I asked it why and how it did that, and gave me an apology saying he should have asked, but thoought my sentence was implicit permission to get the job done. Scary stuff. Have since told it never to do that again
You got off cheap. For me, it deleted the entire Downloads folder (where I kept all my documents), just because I asked it to download some files from bunny.cdn again and it thought it needed space...
Lesson learned, and I'm not using the Downloads folder for anything Claude-related anymore.
Cristian Ciuberea I figure "AI Boundaries" will become mainstream high school and uni subjects moving forward. I know have claude updating Fluent snippets directly, I know thats bad, but I swear it makes things easy. Ill stop and put in some boundaries and backup routines shortly
Warning: Coding, even with Vibe Coding tools, requires strong knowledge, especially when it comes to security. Otherwise, you expose yourself to significant risks. The terms of use of all Vibe Coding tools state this clearly: code must be reviewed before use.
D@vid 💯 I've been picking up a few projects to help people to secure their apps and the holes they have are alarming!!!
Vibe coding = prototyping! (That's literally what it was created for)
It is so helpful - and saves me having to make do with bloated plugins or even hire coders for a small specific requirement.
Paul Hopkins thank you for this post, can you very briefly mention how you do such targeted and personalized enhancements?
I plan to set up a community and this would help me a lot. I am comfortable with using Claude/Codex for making regular websites. I can try for enhancing FluentCommunity. Basically are we limited by some FluentCommunity API or what all is possible?
Can we customize frontend in any way? Can we add some missing user-facing functionality? Is it future proof, or you need to retest it when FluentCommunity gets an update?
Michal Adamczak I’m familiar with Antigravity but I am sure that Claude/Codex must be similar. I started with one specific element I wanted to add: more specific analytics to see how many users had enrolled / progressed / completed courses. I used Gemini to do deep research on the api and the plugin to find how that might be done. Got ChatGPT to create a full prompt to build it, breaking the project into steps. Loaded that into antigravity and used it to generate a plan. Examined the plan - for instance create a custom database table to store data, delete it after 30 days etc. adjusted the plan and let it go. About 10 iterations later, I got it to do security checks, Nonce checks etc, and tested it locally. Uploaded and started using. Learnt a lot about the process. Worked on the next thing I wanted to add. I figure nothing is totally certain if FluentCommunity receives a big update that changes things - but I think that’s normal and you test any updates on a test site first. Nothing has broken with updates yet… but I did say ‘make this as update proof as possible’. Perhaps that helps you?