Vibe coding while live streaming

AI-assisted coding tools are great, but they can do unexpected things.

I gave a 90-minute workshop today on Playwright at Testµ 2025, an online testing conference hosted by LambdaTest. I’ve given my Playwright workshop many times before, but I’ve always taught it with “traditional” coding techniques – the way we automated tests before LLMs hit the scene. In today’s workshop, I tried to spice it up with vibe coding in Cursor. We had mixed results.

Perhaps my approach was too ambitious. I tried to develop a small web app first and then teach how to automate tests for it. I’ve had great success recently building small web apps quickly with AI. Unfortunately, though, the workshop app turned out to be a mess. Thankfully, I had another pre-built web app handy as a backup plan. I was able to get Playwright tests up and running with it pretty quickly. The AI did a decent job refining a script produced by Playwright’s code generator, removing duplicate interactions, adding assertions, and abstracting steps into page objects.

My “workshop” was really more like a livestream. It’s hard to set up lessons with exercises on a short virtual call. Even though the code didn’t turn out like I planned, I was honest and direct with the attendees. I demonstrated where AI-assisted coding tools shine and where they stink. We came up with decent results for Playwright testing. And the attendees seemed to get a lot of value out of it. They asked tons of questions and remained active in the chat for the whole session.

While I am slightly disappointed in myself for not being more prepared to avoid pitfalls, I’m glad that I could show the real me. I’m not perfect in my software practices, but I can still be productive, and I can deliver meaningful value. Hopefully, my workshop encouraged others to be bold in trying new things. And I even learned a few things to make my future workshops better.