Having spoken a few times about my experience with AI ‘vibe coding’ (as I’m told it’s being called…) I thought I would drop a post with my latest experience, being that it’s good news for anyone else wanting to give it a try.
I can imagine experienced ‘today’ coders laughing at my innocence in all this, and that’s fine. I come from a world of BASIC, assembler and COBOL. OO languages, despite my several attempts to learn, still absolutely baffle me. So too does the modern development cycle. So let me be clear that I understand neither the code I’m using, nor how the development process works, yet…
The bottom line is that I have found a way of coding up a native VST3 plug-in that has required no local installation of IDEs, Juice, or compilers on my own computer. The whole thing takes place in Github, for the sake a few copies and pastes.
For reasons I needn’t bore anyone with I wanted a plug-in that takes the MIDI output of an MPE controller and converts it to data suitable for a non-MPE synth with poly aftertouch.
After a fair bit of prompting, re-prompting, and by combining the efforts of both Gemini and DeepSeek, I was given the keys to the door of Github and four chunks of code. Once the code is ‘committed’ in Github the compilation kicks off automatically and out the other end (unless it finds an error) drops a VST3 plug-in, ready to go. Alternatively I give any compilation errors back to my AI friend to try again - and back around the loop we go.
Now I have the plug-in I needed and the basics to do the same again any time in future. I don’t know how it works, but I don’t need to. As long as I can explain what I need I stand a fighting chance of success.
I’m not going to explain the process - AI can help with that, after all! It can talk you through the steps much better than I can. All I’m here to say is that it can be done. Maybe even give it this text for a starter.
Thanks for the info. I’ll look into this as I am currently vibe-coding two plugins, one is a MIDI input transformer to trigger a sequence of chords one step at a time from a single button, the other is a synth for bass guitar that can track a fretkess 5-string. I’ve been using Chat GPT and Juce and both plugins are working surprisingly well.
I don’t (yet) have a dog in this hunt, but just a couple thoughts. First, many of us view music in general as a hobby, maybe a small scale business. I think having support that can program things makes good sense. It’s a niche business (how many musicians who want software solutions are there?), many want to get involved for fun or profit, but may not understand the wants and needs of the musicians, and can make the changes needed as quickly as machine coding. How many can understand both the musical side, and the code side? I have considerable PC experience, but mostly in other areas, l cannot code on any system, at this point. Maybe after l retire.
I guess my main point would be, for the hobbyists among us (many), anything that helps make our hobby more affordable, flexible, and easier to pursue is a good thing. I am no kind of audio purist, and l am not going to gate-keep for much more expensive gear, so make of that what you will.
Nice. I need to try that, I want a VST that basically works like the velocity mapper in Pianoteq, ie one that can easily be calibrated and where I can save different setups and use as profiles.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? You work your way through a song in a DAW or VST host like Cantabile, and find yourself wishing for a simple way to accomplish one task. Whereas before you would dig through tutorials, manuals and help files and maybe find a way to do it in a round about way, now you can ask for the tool and have it made for you almost instantly and at no charge in many instances.
I had a VST3 plugin made by AI just for my own use and plan on getting more of them done in the same way.
It’s certainly life changing for the software user and the professional software developer.
I would never dream of attempting to vibe code something really deep and complex. For that I just look on the market. It’s faster and easier to just pay for complex software. But little things that make one’s life easier? Absolutely.
It’s these little pieces of code that can scratch those itches many of us have.
A few years ago a kind chap here coded me a plug-in that would quantise key presses to a bar boundary. That’s the kind of plug-in that nobody is going to create for fame or fortune, but it’s one of my most used. I’m probably the only person on the planet using it.
Now I’m self-sufficient in itch-scratching plug-ins.
I think vibe coding is great for small things like this. Big companies seem to backing away from AI programming now, as they have realised not knowing how the code works is a maintenance nightmare and potentially leads to maintenance, security and data access risks
