Vibe Coding is Cool, Actually

I have one hour before bedtime, it's fine.

So I'm in Hong Kong right now (and skipping school like a bad boy) because I'll be presenting my on-site analysis of my contest for OCPC Summer 2026.

Now, for presentations, I'd usually rawdog Google Slides and enable per-bullet-point animations on every single slide manually. That's already a pain in the ass, but more importantly, Google Slides is not really easily digestible by ChatGPT for proofreading in full, which I definitely need for non-trivial stuff like competitive programming.

So I sucked it up and made a reusable Typst template. No you can't have it; make it yourself. The nice thing about this is that I can just whack GPT-proofread pseudo-LaTeX in and automatically have nice, animated slides at the ready. I can already see it being really useful for my upcoming TA woes.

Getting the per-bullet-point BS to work was… an experience. I had to crank GPT all the way up to Pro, and even then it spat out a lot of boilerplate.

For the most part, I am strongly against copy-paste brainrot. Long-term cognition offloading issues aside, it's just not my thing. So I did in fact yeet away most of what GPT wrote and ended up with something semi-understandable, which was good because I had to extend it to handle some funny edge cases.

I finished my slides the day before the flight and– oh shit, how am I gonna present this?

See, some developer out there was kind enough to make an extension for Google Slides that lets you present remotely: just tap left or right on your phone. Now that's pretty epic, but this is Typst. No one has done that for Typst. Shit.

Well, the natural solution would just be to install some generalized remote control app on both your presentation device and your phone and use that instead. Not only could I not get it working on my laptop, I also didn't want to risk looking like a clown if it ended up breaking on the university's desktop.

So I prompted GPT and I was ready to learn Cloudflare and WebSockets and Chrome extensions and– oh it wrote the whole thing already.

And it runs perfectly fine.

And I have no idea how it works.

Huh.

It was only then that I really internalized that, holy moly, what would've taken a week's worth of effort for me pre-LLM now takes no more than half an hour of my time.

Now, when I write these sorts of posts (or any posts in general, for that matter), I try to avoid overarching preachy cringe-ass "life lessons". That's disingenuous and I am but a bumbling idiot who's barely surviving on his own. So I'm not gonna re-mother you on how you should or shouldn't use AI. You are tired of that kind of thing, and so am I.

But I do want to reflect on this for a moment. Objectively, I can save time like this. All this Typst nonsense was and is for my purposes only. The mess of duct tape holding everything really doesn't matter to me. If it works, that's good enough.

So then, what does matter to me?

Well, the slides, of course.

You know, I "pride" myself on making high-quality slides for students or contestants or whatever poor soul is subjected to my presentations. But why? I am willing to admit that GPT could "objectively" do a better job than me at summarizing the key points, so why even bother?

At the end of the day, I think it's simply about connection. We humans are evolutionarily wired to crave and seek connection.

LLMs are pretty much at the point where you can self-learn anything from them. So then, surely when you show up for a class or a presentation or anything like that, you deserve more than just to learn.

You deserve to connect with the one who's presenting.

Explaining.

Teaching.

Enlightening.

I think that matters above all else these days.

So to any of my readers who've gotten this far, I hope you've made a meaningful connection with me, and I hope I get to make meaningful connections with many more people in my life.

7 minutes before bedtime let's fucking GO