A Weekend of Vibe Coding ⭐

At some point, I will move past the magic that is vibe coding new apps, not just with Google AI Studio, but with other tools as well. But today is not that day.

This is all Google's fault.

As just one of what felt like 1000 announcements at Google I/O last week, the online giant announced one developer-related advance that caught and held my attention more than most:  You can now build native Android apps based on Kotlin and Jetpack Compose using Google AI Studio, a tool that previously let developers prototype app user interfaces with web app backends. And as the I/O keynote continued past that bit, I found myself getting distracted. So I checked it out.

I wrote about my initial results in I Just Vibe Coded a Markdown Editor With Google AI Studio ⭐. Long story short, the Android app creation capability wasn't available immediately, but I was more successful than expected in creating what turned out to be a series of web app-based Markdown editors. And so the next day, I tried again. As described in And Now I've Vibe Coded a Native Android Markdown App ⭐ - Thurrott.com, I successfully created a few native Markdown editor apps for Android too.

I did not stop there.
Android Studio + Gemini
Emboldened by this success, and by my earlier work using Stardock Clairvoyance and Anthropic Claude Code to finish my multi-document/multi-tab WinUIpad app, I turned to Android Studio, Google's IDE for Android app developers. I knew that it offered an integrated Gemini pair-programming assistance feature, similar to GitHub Copilot in the Visual Studio IDEs. And given that AI Studio is based on Gemini and that Google has specifically trained Gemini with Android developer documentation and best practices, I figured this might work well too. "This" being me, someone who does not know Kotlin (a programming language) or Jetpack Compose (Google's preferred framework for Android app UIs), somehow vibe-coding a real Android app using Android Studio.

Into the abyss I fell.

I've never been a fan of Android Studio. This thing has always felt old-fashioned and crude compared to Visual Studio. But it's also improved a lot in recent years, and it at least presents a modern UI face to the world now. After a bit of noodling around the UI and Googling, I figured out how to connect Gemini to Android Studio through my Google AI Pro subscription. Then, I created a new Android app project with an empty activity, opened the Agent sidebar in the IDE, and asked it to create a native Android app version of a Markdown editor.

It worked on this for a long time. A very long time. It created a lot of files and made numerous changes, but eventually, it just started spitting out garbage. It was like Gemini, which had been close to perfect in AI Studio, had lost its mind. I tried to pick it up repeatedly, but each time I only got garbage responses, jumbles of nonsensical text and numbers. When I tried it the next morning, it appeared that I had run into some kind of...