Vibe coding: tips, tricks, and the tool landscape

Everyone in the room is already coding with AI. Almost nobody agrees on how to do it well — and the gap between the developer getting real leverage and the one getting expensive rework is no longer access to the tools. It's technique.

Last month we put a model in the product. This month we point the models at our own codebases. We'll start with the one idea everything follows from — generating code got cheap, and checking it didn't — then walk through nine specific, usable tips: the twenty-minute memory file that makes every future session smarter, how to make an agent plan before it touches a file, why three failed corrections means restart instead of argue, and how to read a diff a stranger wrote. Each one comes with a line you can copy.

Then we stop talking and do it. We'll take a real prompt from the room and fix it live against an eight-point rubric, and I'll run a real task on a real repo on screen — including the parts where the agent does something dumb, because knowing what that looks like is half the skill.

You'll leave with three things to change on Monday morning, and a set of offline pages — the tips, the prompt rubric, and a ten-tool comparison matrix — to take with you.

Bring one prompt that disappointed you this week, and one task you have to do next week. We'll use both.

Come curious. Beginners and veterans welcome.

SPEAKER

Matt Duffield is President & CTO of Summit Software with 30+ years building enterprise software. A published author of six technical books and U.S. Navy veteran, he now focuses on AI-assisted development, local LLMs, and cloud-native architecture — and mentors the next generation of coders in his spare time.

EVENT DETAILS

Food, drinks, and conversation beginning at 7:00. The talk begins around 7:30. Parking is free at the Gladstone Park SDA church.

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/full-stack-dev-pdx/events/316190567/