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title: Tools for Vibe Coding

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# Tools for Vibe Coding

Over the course of the past couple of years, software development has become accessible to people who have not learned to write software, through "[Vibe Coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)."

This is a shortlist of tools I use for Vibe Coding, in order to help others get started. For a deeper dive into how to use LLM tooling, check out Andrej Karpathy's excellent video, [How I Use LLMs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvNQjAaOHw).

## Cursor
[Cursor](https://www.cursor.com) was my first introduction to an AI coding assistant, and it has been a reliable enough workhorse that I haven't actually tried its competitors. The interface feels exactly like VS Code, with an AI assistant who is happy to do tasks for you, including reading documentation, writing code, testing, debugging, etc. 

With Cursor, you can actually build a website or a simple application using plain English. You describe what you want, and an LLM is happy to build it for you. Depending on how well you choose your language, and how closely you supervise the LLM, outcomes will vary dramatically. 

The free trial will give you a taste, and the \$20 per month membership is enough to get started, but if you are using it heavily you will likely want more than that. At which point you have a couple options: (a) pay more, or (b) switch from using a cloud-based LLM to one that runs on your own machine, which brings us to our next tool.


## Ollama
Not all LLMs are gated behind paywalls, and [Ollama](https://www.ollama.com) makes it relatively straightforward to access the latest and greatest of the free tier. My gut instinct was that the free-tier, laptop-friendly models would all be garbage, but it turns out they are both more capable and faster than I had anticipated, with a little configuration tuning. 

Once you have Ollama set up, it becomes reasonably straight-forward to write some Python code that involves one or more calls to Ollama, and voilà -- you have your first agentic software application!  

## Hugging Face
Whether you're using Cursor, Ollama, or some other tool to access your model, you will need to choose which model you want to be using. [Hugging Face](https://www.huggingface.com) serves as the leaderboard and distribution site -- you can use Hugging Face to inform your decisions about when to use Claude vs. Gemini vs. Deepseek etc.