TinkerQuest - How to vibe on your phone
The goal was to build my son a TinkerCAD1 course in a couple of days with nothing except my phone. And it worked. He now uses TinkerQuest daily to get ready before the 3D printer arrives.
“Why my phone?” you may ask. Well, when I am off work, I have to move about the house a lot, so no sitting at my desk anymore. I didn’t expect that to be a smooth experience, but I also didn’t think I would have to build my own infrastructure to make it work. After ChatGPT Work failed me, I set up a Hetzner2 server with Tailscale3, Codex, and herdr4. It is cheap, simple, and works surprisingly well.
I also decided to start with a bare-bones Codex setup. I didn’t use any of the skills or agents I developed at work. I wanted to see how little setup is needed to get decent results. But unsurprisingly, without any specs or guidance, the results weren’t really great and I wasted time steering Sol in the right direction. Some more structure and upfront work pays off quickly. Just vibing something still doesn’t work, at least not with Sol. Maybe Astra or Fable do the trick, but I am not willing yet to pay the price.
Working on an educational project also showed me that teachers and handcrafted ed content aren’t in danger yet. Except for a very narrow domain like software engineering, learning something isn’t just textual. It needs pictures, videos, sounds, or maybe also something physical. For all their verbal power, LLMs cannot really help here. Sol tried to explain how to design a toy rocket, and that is what it came up with:
I have to be really generous to call that a rocket. Sol also failed to create video clips not because it didn’t have the right tools but because it doesn’t understand. I found some clips but they were completely useless.
I started on a positive note and want to end it like that: getting something up and running quickly and iterating on it with Codex brought back some of the joy of my early days when it was me and a ThinkPad on campus. I didn’t expect that, and it is great.
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