Creative Programming

Last weekend I gave a presentation on Creative Vibe Coding for the Vibe Coding Lab at NP3 MOBi in Groningen. I contacted my long-term friends at NP3 with the suggestion to organize an event on June 21st, 2025, on the use of AI coding agents for creative people. We had a joyful night of vibe coding with a great audience: they discussed, created, and listened very well.

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I recently discovered a neat feature in Anthropic’s Claude Code that I had to share: custom slash commands. I wanted a way to easily tag repository states, and specifically in small projects that do not rely on package.json or similar, by relying on a VERSION file. I decided to dive deep into custom slash commands and create my own semantic versioning command. What I found was a flexible system that has lightened up how I handle routine development tasks.

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I have been using Claude Code for a few weeks now and I’m totally hooked! I foresee a bright future for AI code companions in general and for the role of developers in particular.

I’ve spent quite some money on private projects but I want to keep my costs under control. I think I found a good workflow that balances between having the benefit of Claude Code while also managing expenses.

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Vibe coding… essentially a buzzword, but to be honest, I’ve been doing it since 2003. I thrive on prototyping, quickly translating ideas into visual end results with code. Like painters who paint en plein air: fast brushstrokes, working through mistakes (happy little accidents) - I’ve always felt like a digital impressionist.

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As a web developer with years of experience in JavaScript, I decided in 2021 to expand my skillset by learning Rust. While I was excited about Rust’s performance and safety guarantees, the learning curve was steeper than I anticipated. That’s when I decided to experiment with AI assistance through Claude Code to help me develop a practical project while learning the language.

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For fast prototyping I create tiny projects consiting of some HTML files with JavaScript and CSS assets. Instead of opening them with the file protocol in the browser, I like them served over HTTP. I used to use php -S for this, but I do not want PHP on my machine, so I had to find an alternative. I wrote the alternative in Rust.

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During programming I still need to look up a lot of implementation details of features I am using; it appears that I do not know many things by heart, obviously – unfortunately. How to settle a discussion about HTTP response codes when it comes to 422 versus 400, 401 or 403? I need to look that up… I am an avid user of the MutationObserver and the IntersectionObserver, but I find it hard to remember all methods and options. I need to look that up too!

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My other article about web development via the MAMP stack in Docker is the most popular article of this website to date. That’s great! It feels good to give back to the community from which I learned so much over tha past 15 years! This article is a follow up when using a custom PHP8 Docker image.

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