“Database is locked”

It’s a message that anyone who has been working on WordPress Core long enough has seen. While it’s considerably less prevalent that it once was, it hasn’t fully disappeared. The most common searches I do on WordPress core trac are of commits. I’m trying to track down a change that I have bits and pieces of in my memory. And when the database is locked? I need to stop and wait.

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“Vibe Coding”

This is the term that is being used to describe the act of using an LLM to do the coding and for you to just describe the vibes. 404 Media describes it as meaning

…being less methodical and detail oriented, telling the AI tool what you want, and getting it to work without worrying about the code base being messy.

Sunday night I decided to try it out and after a little bit of back and forth, I launched my browser based search tool for WordPress Core Commits.

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One of the nice parts of vibe coding a little side project is that you can have some fun with it. You can give a prompt such as I don't love the way things are looking. Can you make it prettier? Make the words "pop" and it will do what many bad clients have wanted. Now the words “pop”.

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I wasn’t able to completely embrace vibe coding, but what I did for this was rely on myself for code review and “major architectural decisions”. I chose the search library, build tool, and did the testing but let my prompts do the majority of the rest of the work.

This was a simple and low pressure experience. It’s a tool that I wanted for myself and am happy to share but it’s not one that I am going to rely on others to maintain.

I am going to experiment with vibe coding some more and hope the vibes are immaculate.