Hung Truong: The Blog!

Goodbye Claude and Gemini, Hello Codex!

There’s been a few changes in the AI CLI landscape, so it’s time for a new blog post! I’ve once again switched my AI best friend. This time from Claude to OpenAI’s Codex.

So since the last blog post I made about vibe coding with Claude Code and what I learned, it seems like Claude got really dumb. I actually let my subscription lapse so I could do other stuff (like play with text to video AI) so I didn’t witness this firsthand. But judging from the Claude Code subreddit and even this official blog post from Anthropic, it sounds like there was quite the regression (which Anthropic didn’t even admit to for a while, and when they did, they didn’t compensate anyone for it).

Fun With Wan 2.2 Text To Video AI

This blog post is pretty much also a Youtube video, so if you want, you can just watch that instead!

I recently got interested in text to video AI generators after reading a post about Wan 2.2. I hadn’t really been interested in them before because they all kind of sucked, and they either took too much VRAM or were proprietary ones that you couldn’t run locally like Veo or Sora, etc.

But after looking at some of the videos that Wan 2.2 could generate, and seeing that it could run on some pretty standard hardware, I decided to look into it a bit more.

31 Days with Claude Code: What I Learned

It’s been… one month since I purchased a Claude Pro subscription so I could try Claude Code instead of freeloading off of Google Gemini’s CLI. I thought I would take a look at the things I learned while vibe coding a few projects, and other uses that I found for Claude Code besides coding. If you missed it, be sure to check out my initial post about vibe coding, and the followup about how Claude Code was definitely better than Gemini (for now)!

Context is King!

So there’s a lot of talk about how prompt engineering is dead, and “context engineering” is the new hotness. That makes a lot of sense to me, as I ran into this issue constantly while using Claude Code, and to a lesser degree, with Gemini CLI. To understand context, let me first give you some… context.

How Much Code Could Claude Code Code if Claude Code Could Code Code? (It Can!)

Previously on my blog, I wrote about vibe coding and how I was experimenting with Google CLI, the free agentic AI thing that runs in your command line. I talked about how cool it was, but also how I was too cheap to try anything that cost money. After repeatedly hearing about how good Claude Code was, I decided to scrounge up the last few dollars I had in my vast money bin and spent $20 on Claude Pro. So was it worth it? Heck yeah it was! Claude Code is my new best friend!

My Obligatory Blog Post About Vibe Coding As a Software Engineer

As generative AI has gotten better in the past months/years, I’ve been trusting it more to do stuff that I’d normally only trust myself to do. Earlier this year I started yet another refactor of my web app, Anime Nano, since I wanted to get it off of the $10 a month DigitalOcean host I was using. I decided to try using Cloudflare since it’s “serverless” and seems to be able to handle a buttload of traffic (which Anime Nano will never see).

I usually reserve Anime Nano refactors (at this point they’re a pretty regular occurrence, as I’ve refactored it from Rails to Django, and using different databases and hosts, and deployment technologies like Chef and Docker) for technologies that I’m somewhat familiar with. Or technologies that I want to learn. At this point, though, I have a lot less patience for learning stuff that I’m unfamiliar with.

I decided to try and let AI do most of the heavy lifting, and successfully used Google Gemini (I think it might’ve been 2.0 Pro) in January to move the most basic functionality of Anime Nano to Cloudflare. I was hoping to stay on the free tier, but I think the CPU time limits were being killed by my cron jobs for fetching blog posts. So I ended up signing up for the $5 a month plan for workers, which isn’t really that bad. There’s still plenty of capacity left for any other online experiments I want to run, so that’s a bonus. I was thinking of hosting my personal blog on Cloudflare Workers at some point, but GitHub Pages is free and it works just fine. It is a bit annoying writing my blog posts in Markdown and using Jekyll though.

Anyway, this blog post is supposed to be about vibe coding! I did pretty much vibe code the MVP of Anime Nano in AI Studio, though it was kind of a pain because I had to copy and paste stuff and make sure that it worked. And if it didn’t I had to really yell at the AI until it did what I wanted it to do. Still, I found it was a success, and I relaunched the web app in Next.js, a technology that I still don’t really understand all that well!