Masterson: I’ve been vibe coding<\/a> for about a year, getting really into the meat and potatoes. I trained a friend of mine, with whom I worked at a restaurant, and we got good enough together to win a hackathon. I thought: This is duplicatable.<\/p>\n Who do I care about more than anybody? My mom. She talked about building a website, and she didn’t want to be dependent on Weebly. I was like, “Do you want to learn how to do it yourself? I can walk you through stuff. I’m not going to be on the keyboard. I’ll just say words.”<\/p>\n Merlo: I’ve been building websites for as long as we’ve had the internet. WordPress was really hard and labor-intensive. Then I switched over to Wix for a minute, then Weebly<\/a>. My husband also has a website, and we’ve got a third website for something else.<\/p>\n I got an email about a month or two ago, saying they were going to make me pay for two years and that they were raising my rate. At that point, I went to Kevin. I said: “What can I do so that I’m not having to pay so much for a website?”<\/p>\n He started with this ideation phase. What do you want? What’s it look like? What’s it feel like? We had a long conversation.<\/p>\n Masterson: The lessons were in-person. I’d sit in the corner of the room, and she’d be on her computer. At the beginning, it’s so important to have a face. It was more structured sessions and more handholding.<\/p>\n Kevin Masterson sat in the corner while his mom, Carol Merlo, learned to vibe code.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kevin Masterson<\/p>\n Merlo: The difference between this and the drag-and-drop interfaces is that it’s all words. You have to be able to type the words of the thing you want. With ChatGPT, I’ll send it a picture or a clip. Well, no pictures here. This is coding.<\/p>\n I’m old, so I come from the world of reading. I’m highly academic, and everything I do is words. Nowadays, people don’t have the patience for it. They don’t even have the patience for videos. You need a clip<\/a>. How are you going to learn this in a clip? So, people have to learn patience and the willingness to do it.<\/p>\n Masterson: She was a little timid at times. Like, “I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve got another question.” That’s what I’m here for! Sometimes thirty seconds can save her an hour of headache.<\/p>\n Merlo: It was completely new for me. I developed a Word document that tells me what to do here, what to do there, and what this word means.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n