DEV Community: tkdguy85

Vibe Coding a Guitar Tuner

tkdguy85 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:26:53 +0000

I’m not much of a writer, so I apologize ahead of time for how random this read might get. But I’ll try to keep things a bit organized. I’m adding headers for those who’s ADHD is on par with mine. Also, I originally wrote this in Notion and after deleting and re-writing it a couple of times, I've accepted that this is just thought regurgitation, so read this at your own peril. Enjoy.

You can check out the guitar tuner in question here → https://tkdguy85.github.io/guitar-tuner/

Preface - you could skip this part, just rambling.

I’m a software developer and after getting laid off a few months ago, I spent a lot of time brushing up on old skills and dabbling with different frameworks and concepts just to get a feel of what some of companies are either working with or asking for. Combine this curiosity with the mixed AI sentiments that my LinkedIn feed floods my timeline with and I finally decided to run a little experiment myself. Everyone talked about how something they built and rarely provided any examples. Even with just simple proof-of-concepts, it was always a lot of talk but nothing really to show for it.

I could join the chorus of other voices and go on about my own feelings towards AI, authenticity, ethics around how these models are built…but that’ll just have to wait for another article maybe. During my recent developer role, I had more ups than downs working with Github Co-pilot and it was helpful most of the time with autocompleting some functions or repetitive syntax and was also supplemental with some debugging, but again, that would be an article for another time. With that, let’s just jump into the the WHAT, the WHY, the HOW, the WTF, and the NOW. I’m warning you that I’ll ramble, get distracted, feed some birds in our backyard, and then maybe have some resolution or links throughout this article to actual stuffs. But read this how ever you see fit, skim through it, analyze it, yell at me via your keyboard because I’ve clearly made mistakes, just know that I only hope this triggers some thoughts of your own and you’ll completely forget about me by the end of this and go do something awesome for yourself.

The What

What is this about? This article is me sort of brain dumping a project that I thought was only going to be a day or two of messing around with a “vibe coded project”. I honestly thought this was going to be something fairly quick and simple and then after 3ish weeks of on and off updates, more prompting and then some “fine, I’ll do it myself”, I finally got around to sort of getting it working. There’s some wonkiness involved, but we’ll touch on that later. My goal with this was basically to just see for myself how effective this “vibe coded” is, but from two different lenses. One view was seeing this from the creator/programmer point of view. The other was from an end user point of view.

I’m a typical bedroom guitarist. I own over 15+ guitars that I’ve purchased or have been gifted to over the past 20 years. I have one special guitar, an Ibanez RG550, that was gifted to me by my wife when she proposed to me back in 2020 (I said yes, before I even noticed that there was a gig bag sitting behind me). Outside of that guitar, none of them are really high quality or even expensive by guitar standards. I like tinkering around with pawn shop finds or messing around with a cheap brand by taking them apart and seeing if I could make them a bit better. I also like playing in a variety of different genres and tunings, which now we get to, THE WHY.

The Why

One of my favorite guitar tuning sites went down after the start of the year (that project was probably just abandoned). For those who don’t know, guitars can be set to a variety of different tunings. Some music genres use tunings that are too low for some standard tuners and sometimes, you just want to experiment with different sounds. That’s where I decided that I could build out a guitar tuner and have some even deeper insights into what was going. The plan was simple: I was going to prompt Claude Code to build out a VueJS based app and then just piece everything together. There’s some more ramblings about the process that can be found in the README.md file in my repo here. With that, let’s dive into THE HOW.

The How

The prompt

I want help building out a simple guitar tuner with these following requirements:

Language: VueJS frontend, Python Backend, Docker container if this will keep things simpler

The interface will include four different instrument sound types: Bass, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Pure Tones.

The display will give you the option of different tunings for the different instruments. 4 - 7 strings of Bass and 6 - 8 strings of guitar.

There will also be an option to have the tones either repeat after a few seconds or be one solid tone that plays until you stop it.

There should be the ability to add additional tunings that can be saved, but also a list of common tuning options available. You should also be able to change the individual string notes if desired.

The app should be able to run offline and be accessible to any one on any desktop, tablet, or mobile device.

With this prompt, I just wanted to go a bit wild and see what it would spit out, but after reviewing and debating on the first iteration, I prompted again for a much simpler build. Were these good prompts for the first time, probably not. But I’m also using the free tier and if I would’ve hit limits, I’d have stopped ages ago and just went back to other projects.

To Claude - “I would rather this be a full Vue project with components”

I’m jumping around this a bit because there were a couple of iterations that I wasn’t really interested in setting up. Initially, the frontend only VueJS suggestion came back as a long HTML file pointing to a Vue CDN. But I wanted to spin this up using my normal Vue flow. So I started up a separate Vue project using Vite and then just started swapping the files in its place. Within about an hour or so, I was able to piece things together and after refreshing the browser, Walla or Wah-lah, or Wall-e (whatever one makes me sound less like Super Mario in your head)…the site was up. But then…it started…THE WTF.

The WTF

One of the things I heard a lot about with some of these vibe coded builds was their generic approaches to styling. I didn’t give it any prompts and with some smaller examples I’ve prompted both Claude and Chat GPT with in the past, I’d usually get served back something that was very Tailwind heavy, but feeling more like a preset website builder’s template. What I got was a fairly simple layout that isn’t too far from what the current state of the site is now. That is, with the exception of the guitar playback buttons and that’s something I’m going to focus on heavily from hear on out.

Reminder, the main point of this app is to serve as a guitar tuner. For me, this means that I have something where I can hit the play button and then tune my live guitar to the audio frequency that the app is putting out. Before even hitting the buttons and testing the notes, the first big flag was that the layout was sort of frustrating (I should’ve taken screenshots, but it’s not that important). The buttons were laid out in a centered column, which meant that I’d have to scroll down a bit as I would go through the tunings if this were viewed from my phone or tablet. Easy fix though, I just updated the styling and layouts to shift the containers 90º and then displayed those containers in a row. Quick easy done. Not bad right?

When I hit the first note, something felt off. And then, the next note was the same as the first. All of the notes were playing the same sound. Hopped into one of the JS files handling audio and it was a mess. Some variables were being reused, over-written, or not used at all. Functions declared, but not called. And this was all just the “programmer-side” of what was and wasn’t working. If you didn’t know what you were listening for, how would you know that instead of the standard EADGBE tuning layout, you just had AAAAAA. Even if all of the notes where actually different, would you think about writing test that both makes sure that they are in fact different notes, the right key, a different octave between the first and last E strings?

While I could deep dive into all of the other finicky issues that were happening just with the interface and what was happening in the background, I don’t want to veer too far off of what I ultimately took away from building this out. That leads me to THE NOW.

THE NOW

At the end of the day, this project was 75% curiosity and 25% practicality. There are other tuners out there (I even link to one on the site that works 100x better, but is less flexible with tunings without a paid plan). I wanted to jump in and see the hype first hand and I will say, I am and continue to still be fairly impressed by what these tools FEEL like they’re doing. But the missing human input is something that felt very real.

To someone who doesn’t care, know or have any interest into the purpose of the code, all they generally seem to see is that some model spit out 100,000+ lines of code and did it minutes. All you have to do is prompt cleverly, pay for tokens, and iterate fast, then you’ll be set. That’s the sentiment that I feel from a lot of the noise across all the boards, forums, developers are obsolete chatter.

Peak developers aren’t just those with the most clever work-arounds, sharpest minds, fastest typing, and a VIM powered battle station that is either over-engineered or so bare bones that it could run on a hamster-wheel powered dial-up device. I’m not excluding them, but I also want to highlight the people who still love doing this. Someone out there is going to run a program and see “hello world” in the console and light up. Someone is going to build some super wonky app, with the worse interface in the world and only usable for themselves, and that’s all that truly matters. Someone’s going to vibe code a bit of software and put it out there with all the hopes of it making them a few bucks and helping others. So many scenarios, so many situations, so many so many’s (I couldn’t find a better way to wrap this up). Regardless of all the noise, we’ll all find ourself somewhere along the spectrum of how we feel around AI tooling. Enhancements, exposure, wins, failures, all of that coupled with our personal interactions with these tools are unpredictable. What’s right versus what’s wrong won’t always be black and white.

What I do know, at least for me, is how much more impressed I am when I can admire the craftsmanship of the things that interest me. Some people are only fueled by profits, fame and clout. Some folks are truly wanting to make the world a better place for their small corners of the universe. The world is ever-changing and that’s inevitable.

My take away from all of this wasn’t about how good or how bad the tooling is. I’m sure it will continue to get better. But this only came to fruition because I knew what the end goal was and what was needed for this to at least be “useful”. This was supposed to be me just seeing how something that would probably take me months to build from scratch can just be done in a matter of minutes and instead I walked away with knowing that it’s not a bad tool to have in my back pocket, but this caffeine consuming mush-ball fretting about posts on LinkedIn…is still the best tool that I have at my disposal. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk. And if you made it this far, thanks for reading and you can bug me here at tkdguy85 on LinkedIn. Peace.

Getting out of Stuck (tips)

tkdguy85 — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:47:02 +0000

Getting stuck sux, but...

Here's some tips to help you out...hopefully.

Whether you're coding a drop down menu, writing a blog, designing the next best thing, or simply sitting in front of a blank screen wondering 'now what?', we all experience various ways of getting stuck. Instead of giving out some wordy bits of advice, obnoxiously long quotes with theoretical undertones and long, exaggerated internal revelations (like, I kinda just did, but don't worry)...I want to just fire off a bunch of simple bullets to maybe jog the noggin, mix up the thoughts...you know...that sorta thing you need when you get a bit stuck.

Before we get into it, these are all just kind of things that may be obvious now, but not when it's 3AM and you're determined to beat the sunrise to completion. In some cases we can't always walk away from the work station or may not be in positions to

So in no particular order and sort of off the top of my head:

Walk away:

If possible, for a minute or so, just step away from the workspace. Allow yourself the chance to come back to the task refreshed and with a slightly uncluttered set of eye brains with hands or something.

Study break:

Not like, a break break, but like take a break from the block to look it up. Google, ask someone in the know, or step back and deconstruct the blockage. Similar to walking away, talking about it a bit can sometimes get a second opinion to restart the mental engine.

Talk to the ball:

Talk it out loud. I've found myself reading through something out loud and it was like listening to myself dictate the problem helped me realized that what I was saying wasn't matching up to what I was seeing. Talk to a bobble head, toy goat, bottle of hand sanitizer, anything that doesn't make you seem a little bit insane and just air out the block. Who knows, maybe that little lapse of sanity gets the gears turning.

Talk to a stranger

Not so much a perfect stranger, but maybe a spouse, co-worker, friend, online video game buddy, just someone outside of the scope of normal. It made lead to know where. It may lead to you trying to briefly explain your goal and unhinging the blockage then and there.

Breathe

Sometimes, we're so caught up in the moment that we forget how mentally clearing it can be to just breathe. Close your eyes for a few seconds, and count out your breathe. Maybe a 1-3 second in and out or a deeper 5 second in, 5 second hold, 5 second out pattern. Experiment, but like, don't die. Breathing has been scientifically proven to be useful for living. I remember sitting on the floor, closing my eyes, and taking a few breaths and just jumping up and rushing back to my chair because somehow in that mental count, I realized that my code wasn't doing just that...counting.

Sleep

Sometimes you have to close the lid, cap the pen, put down the burrito and rest. Give it time to manifest or to have a fresh clearing moment and return again after resting. Be it over night, a quick nap, or even a YouTube veg-out session (that's sleeping in some ways, right?), the mental restart might be the kick you need.

Conclusion

This isn't an all inclusive listing. This was probably just a quick random read/time-waster that may have helped in unblocking your block, I wouldn't know. But what I do want to leave you with is we are all sort of normal in some ways or something. Seriously, everyone hits bumps or road blocks and we have to be open to asking for help and trying to un-free ourselves and not settle with that inner monologue of 'I'm too dumb' or 'my pride would never allow help from him/her/cat/dog'. But also remember that everyone hits bumps and one day, someone might come up to you with a similar mental burp, so instead of calling them lazy or writing lengthy complaints on Stack-Overflow... take a breathe, give your two cents, and carry on.

Best wishes.
-Dallas

Cover: Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
Inset: Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Failure is an option?

tkdguy85 — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 22:13:23 +0000

Ok, here me out. While it sounds like some 'wanna-be' profound muttering, I do think it's something that's not said enough. The caveat here is kind of a 'read the room' type approach. If you're driving a car on public roads, increasing the speed in which you take that on-ramp to work by +5 mph until your wheels slip and you find yourself attempting to convince authorities that it was for science...is dumb...don't be dumb.

But coding, we're here for coding, development, design, etc. Right? Anyway, the whole failure thing. Elon Musk's quote resonated with me recently, because I was able to witness this practice in real time. An experimental set of rocket test went as follows:

Concept design that was deemed impossible to work because it looked like a grain silo with tiny wings.
*First test flight that showed engines were capable of lifting the vehicle and initiating the descent and landing procedure.
*Second test flight with modifications made to fueling and other control systems.
*Third test resulted in a hard, but successful landing attempt.
All of these test ended in epic fashion...the prototypes exploded in a glorious fashion. A lot of people were disappointed in the rocket not landing on the first attempt or witnessing all of the engineering marvels and days of labor put into the build. But for the teams behind these builds, every test was a success. But how?

Every explosive ending gave tons of valuable data. This led to brainstorming potential issues to establishing real-life limitations of different components and scenarios. Every 'misstep' gave way to refined checklist and 'what not to do's'. Even Elon's response of 'we were too dumb' was a tongue-n-cheek poke at all of the internet sleuths and critics jumping to hypothetical conclusions and sometimes bizarre assumptions as to what needs to be done. Even after a successful landing, the rocket exploded and while it makes reviewing the post launch status of the vessel much more difficult...it still garnered tons of usable data and experiences to build on for future launches.

So what about us...what does this have to do with us. If things are not failing, you're not innovating enough? To some extent...absolutely.

*90's web pages look incredibly different from what we see today because of innovation.
*Electric cars are becoming more norm and less fad because of innovation.
*Travel and commerce industries are constantly revolving because of innovation.

20 years ago, if I said I took a picture with my phone...people would think I was crazy. And today...they could ask me to forward it to their email to add to an app later. What I'm getting at is...in all of these endeavors, mistakes are made and lessons are learned. And for us...

Don't give up. That failed interview could give you insight on how to better prepare for the next one. That failed variable could highlight some vulnerabilities in your coding process. That burned fajita may tell you to pay more attention, turn the heat down, or don't overcook what should've been a yummy lunch. Nonetheless, don't give up...but also, pay attention and try to dive deep to extract the lessons learned from experience.

Otherwise...you'll keep burning fajitas.

The Sandwich Scientist.

tkdguy85 — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 18:52:23 +0000

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash -Cover Photo

Photo by Gardie Design & Social Media Marketing on Unsplash Title Photo

Give it your best...

you never know who's watching

To keep this short, I'm leaving out almost all of the details, but I don't want to understate how awesome of a person this young lady continues to be.

Working at a local sandwich shop, a young woman takes helm of the lunch crowd. Feverishly working both the register and the food counter, she builds sandwiches for her customers and sends them on her way with polite, yet rapid flow. For reasons never asked, a laboratory director takes note of how well she handles the stress of the job. From complex orders to difficult customers, she stays focused and manages every situation almost flawlessly. He approaches her one day with a job offer: come and work as a lab technician with us, we'll pay you more than whatever you're making now. Without little hesitation, she accepts. A couple of years later, she's one of the most valued microbiologist on the bench. If she's gone, the lab suffers a quick and attentive worker. When she's assigned to a specific area, her coworkers breathe easy knowing that behind there back, she's got them covered. Self-taught in areas she didn't understand and not afraid to ask "why does this work" or "what is that for", she took to the laboratory life brilliantly.

This story isn't meant to say that changing jobs will make life better or worse. This isn't meant to say take every risk because you never know. I feel the moral of this story is not just that whole "you never know who's watching", but more along the lines of being able to do anything you put your mind and heart towards. I remember talking with her one day and asking her what was it like coming into the lab knowing very little about what to expect and how much more different work life could be. She said she was a bit intimidated by not knowing what all the job entailed. Her main focus was to take whatever task was presented to her and make the best of it. If she didn't know what something was or how something worked, she'd observe it in use, ask questions of how and why something was done a particular way, and eventually, she just started getting the hang of how certain devices worked. It was like, knowing what buttons to push and when at first and then understanding the how's and why's as she grew more comfortable.

That is not always going to be the case, but I think there's something there in being able to take that first little motion, step by step, until all those motions start to come together to form leaps and bounds. Don't be afraid to ask and don't be afraid to try. Press forward little by little and you've got this.

-Dallas

Go for it... even if you're new...

tkdguy85 — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 17:37:30 +0000

PICTURED: 'E.coli growing on agar plates using two different treatments.' -from my phone, during a testing phase.

TL:DR

Going into a job in which I felt over my head, I ended up creating a chemical medium that not only saved our company money on excess materials, but also made the use of the chemical much easier for other technicians and staff.

This is a bit wordy, and the important parts are in the last 2 paragraphs, but maybe this helps you out. I hope it does.

You just never know

A couple of years ago, I accepted a position akin to a food microbiologist for a laboratory I knew very little about. I'll spare the details of other things that occurred during my tenure and instead, focus on a story that I think we all need to hear.

As a new associate, there wasn't really too much that was expected of me. But I did have previous experience working as a lab technician many years prior in which I was simply mixing various chemical powders, boiling flask of medium, and pouring agar into petri dishes and filling tubes with all sorts of liquids. So all of the 'scien-cy' stuff aside, I want to talk about a little project that I undertook.

Me, the complete newb that I was, noticed that on the bench, we were adding a chemical to this agar to make differentiating bacteria from background material much easier on these mostly translucent petri dishes. Having a good relationship with the crew responsible for setting up the base chemicals for the lab, I was able to divvy up my day between helping them out and doing bench work. I started to experiment with the chemical that we were adding in the main lab with the guys who were preparing the base material. Something clicked.

Too much of this chemical turned our base agar a Kool-Aid red. Too little and the chemical dissipated under heating pressure. After a few batches of figuring out how much of said chemical to add to the base batch, my eyes lit up. It worked. I found a percentage right in the 'Goldilocks' zone that gave us the result that we wanted to achieve. By doing this, we no longer needed to undergo a filtration step ($$) as well as needing to store the chemical in a separate container ($).

Sooo....what?

I went into the job fearing the fact that all of the other techs/micros had college degrees and various levels of experience. I had nothing more than skills learned from other jobs and curiosity.

The moral of this story is, regardless of where you come from and what you know, you can always bring something to the table. I had to as Senior level Microbiologist for ideas for testing out the chemicals. I also had to ask Lab Technicians for their time and input on how much more or less difficult following this chemical recipe would be. I was always curious about the tasks that I was completing and also felt compelled to see what I could do to make my days more streamlined. Most people had just accepted that this was the one and only way things could be done and I caught A LOT of flack from people who thought I was wasting my time by going forth and doing this. After the testing phase was complete, I was asked to present my finding and suggestion in front of the lab director and the entirety of our staff. He had joking pointed out that I had achieved the impossible by finding a safer, cleaner method to doing something that had the side-effect of saving us money. WIN/WIN.

But more than that, what I got from the whole experience was, everyone brings something to the table. Even the new kid that seems like they may have very little knowledge or understanding of what's going on. You just never know what you can or can't do, unless...you give it a try. Go out there and get it.

-Dallas III

A new beginning...

tkdguy85 — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 16:15:17 +0000

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

A fresh start? My first entry, blog, whatever ever, is here. A couple of weeks ago, I got a haircut. No big deal for almost every person that I know, except, I've had my 'locs' for almost 20 years. I've cut them low, I've dyed them, re-twists, etc. But, after some complications with my hair, physical stresses, and sort of an emotional 'exhale', I sat in the chair talking with this lovely woman (that I met, like, 48 seconds ago) and without going through the options of what I could do to salvage my mangy hair, I just said "let's cut it". After the deed was done, I texted my fiancée to tell her that I cut it and she replied "no matter what, I love you, and you'll be hot regardless". She's so polite in her little lies to make me feel like I've done the right thing. But, you shouldn't get caught up in reading about me. This story would take us a 2-hour coffee break for me to get to the point, because I'm one of those people who drone on about the minutiae of intricate things you're clearly uninterested....

Right, yes, a new beginning...

The point of that initial story is, career change, hair change, picking up a new talent, going to a gym, etc... All of these things can be daunting in their own ways. New faces or obstacles. New technologies or terminology. Should you do it? Is it worth the risk? We focus sooooo much on what's the worse that can happen, but rarely on what's are some of the best possible outcomes.

I was annoyed at thinking of how many people were going to ask about what happened and why I cut my hair. But, after a couple of weeks, that faded away. A couple of months ago, I left my job to focus on my efforts on diving deeper into the tech side of things, but also incorporate my science background into whatever new journey I began.

So what's the point, why bring this up? I don't know who you are, but chances are you've gotten this far, not reading this (probably not too hard), but where you are today. Whether or not you battle some sort of imposter syndrome or feel if you are or aren't ready... you've gotten this far. A junior developer looking to get into the field. A senior engineer learning a new tech stack. A project manager going after what could be the biggest, most defining obstacle of their career. You got this far. You made it this far. You could fail. You could suck. You could barely pass. You could succeed.

You could... only if you try. Is it worth the risk? I'm not you, but take a second to think about both outcomes and not just the one that excites your ego or feeds your doubt. I personally think you've got this. But, I'm just a random voice in your head. Peace.