I recently completed a course from Brad Traversy at Traversy Media called Coding with AI.
I was looking to move beyond chatting with AI for my “vibe coding” sessions and into something a bit more structured. Up to this point, most of what I was building had to fit inside the limits of tools like Claude or ChatGPT in a browser. It worked, but as projects got larger and more complex, the cracks in that workflow started to show, especially if this was going to be more than just a weekend experiment.
I had dabbled with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and early versions of Claude Code, but quickly realized I wasn’t ready for them yet. Or maybe I just didn’t need that level of horsepower. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to give up that much control. Likely a mix of all three.
That shift, from chatting with AI to working with it inside VS Code, sounds small. And technically, it is. But it changes how…