I’ve been having a lot of fun vibe coding with ChatGPT lately. I’ve been building websites since I was in middle school, but I am not an engineer by any means, and ChatGPT has helped me update some of my old websites.

Case in point: La Voz Del Mambo, a salsa website I helped recover from the wreckages of the web was super outdated, wasn’t mobile friendly, and had tons of broken functionality including basic things like getting pages to load.

After vibe coding with ChatGPT (o4-mini-high) I was able to get the site responsive, fix bugs, add new functionality and update website copy– all within just a few hours.

I’ve even started to update my salsa dancing calendar on Salsa Vida, which I pretty much given up on during the pandemic, but have up-leveled in terms of design, functionality and maintainability with the help of ChatGPT.

Tasks that would have taken me months before I am able to now able to knock out in hours. Yesterday, I built out a whole section for salsa dance festivals, which is completely scalable, and even added a feedback button with a fancy jQuery dropdown all in one day.

I typically use o3 for strategic and architecture level questions, and then switch to o4-mini-high for the actual coding bits. I’ve started to use Deep Research as well to research dance events happening in other cities.

I am constantly having to redefine what is “difficult”, because some items that seem so complicated I don’t even know where to start, ChatGPT is able to solve in minutes, although sometimes it gets stuck on basic things, like breaking my website CSS.

There has been a lot of hype in the media lately about AI taking white collar jobs– it’s not quite there yet (believe me, I keep trying to automate my job), but in terms of helping me build websites, ChatGPT is like having a fulltime autistic programmer working for me.