(Brief note: work on Escaping Mediocrity is coming along nicely. I've started to finalize the marketing pitch for both books and they seem to work extremely well together. I've put an April 15th publication date on the latter. We need to have a goal!)
So let's talk about what I call the 'season of gloom' and the new phrase that is sweeping the tech and AI world, 'vibe coding.' It turns out that I'm in the midst of the former and have been doing the latter.
The 'season of gloom?' That's what I call this period between the end of ski season and the start of golf. Some folks call it other things, and some are not fit for sharing. According to one chart, yesterday we were in the midst of our third winter.
Yesterday, we had a massive little mini-blizzard, ice pellets, freezing rain, rain - and then just now, overnight, some pretty massive thunderstorms. Golf can't start soon enough! I try to manage my despair by opening my pool in just over a week for a quick swim.
I also try to keep my optimism for spring in check by following various long-range weather forecasts to try to get a sense of when we might emerge from the gloom. I have, for many years, been trying to teach myself to understand these long-range weather patterns by studying various weather model forecast maps. To do that this year, I've been doing a bit of 'vibe coding' - I just created my nifty new long-range weather page which I built using AI. You can visit it at https://weather.beingoblio.com/longrange.html
This little page lets me access various long-range weather models, to get a sense of what might be happening with the weather 10 to 14 days out. There's not a lot of consistency in weather predictions that far out, but this can be used to get a sense of where there is some agreement and where might find ourselves in terms of the jet stream, temperature patterns, high and low-pressure systems, and more. (Click the little 'i' icon and you can get a description of each map.)
I'm using it to try to chase away the gloom, by understanding what the weather might look like two weeks out - hence, today's quote. It leads me to weather forecast maps like this...
...which shows what the jetstream might look like on April 13, just 10 days out - and implies the season of gloom will be in full swing as the jet stream pulls in some massive cold arctic air into the region where I live.
Data can make us sad!
Anyway, I digress. What does this have to do with 'vibe coding.' What's that? It's something that I've been doing for quite some time, and which now has a phrase that goes with it. According to Wikipedia:
Vibe coding (also vibecoding) is an AI-dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM generates software, shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code.Vibe coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and listed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the following month as a "slang & trending" noun.
I've been doing 'vibe coding' for a little over a year - I've used AI to write little websites that track whether my various websites are up or down or show a random inspirational quote from my archive, or developing code in languages such as Python or PHP that undertake various data analysis projects for me. It's fun, solves a lot of problems, and is another new skill I've been teaching myself.
So what does it lead to? A little project like this one - my random quote generator - that one is still in operation at random.jimcarroll.com,
Back to my weather dashboard - when I decided I needed a concise little toll that would help understand lng range weather so I could ward off the season of gloom, I headed off to Claude.Ai and gave it a prompt:
I want to build a web page that will help me to analyze 14-day weather trends. Highlight for me the key forecast maps that I should consider at PivotalWeather, and what I can learn from them.
From there, a little project ensued in which Claude and I had a lot of back and forth - we were vibing! - until I had the HTML code for the Web page I wanted... that I now track through the days as I chase the data that might help me understand when we might see the end of the season of doom!
I'm waiting for a real spring vibe to kick in.
I'm still waiting.
But there is hope.
Fore!
Futurist Jim Carroll’s wife gets pretty tired of his complaining during the ‘season of gloom.’