Gitpod Impresses

I would consider myself a skeptic when it comes to vibe coding and the use of LLM’s. But credit where it’s due. Gitpod did a good job of slapping together a small, simple Elixir app.

So over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to pin down some occassional issues with my wifi. I created a small Elixir script to test speed and then deployed it on a GhostBSD box which was an old laptop. Works like a champ. And then I remembered that there was another AI technology that I wanted to give a little spin: Ona (formerly Gitpod). Ona aims to be an all-in-one cloud development solution. It creates a VM¹ for you in the cloud, it uses AI to generate code, it lets you modify the code with VSCode and/or a number of other editors, and it’s generally pretty nice about it. I’d rate it as somewhat like replit and I have some friends who absolutely love replit.

So I have to say I was a bit more impressed with Ona than I expected to be. I wanted to create a new script to check for network outages. Obviously it’s easy for me to spot when the network is down when I’m sitting and working on something but if I’m away from my desk or it’s a weekend or something—well I want an automated check. I told Ona to create an Elixir app to check for connection to certain websites every 5 seconds and to record failures in a Postgresql database. I don’t want to record everything; 10,000 records telling me that the internet was fine doesn’t seem much of a help to me.

Ona created solid code and it was mostly right (more on that below). It also installed Elixir to the VM without me asking it to do so and it was smart enough to fetch dependencies and to ensure the code compiled. It also allowed me to commit the code right from the VM to Github so I don’t have to keep running it on their VM. This is doubly nice because one thing I’ve heard from lots of vibe coders is you need to commit your code very, very often otherwise the AI may regress it for you.

So, as I mentioned above a few minor quibbles.

1.) Ona wasn’t smart enough to stand up Postgresql on the VM for me. Or maybe I didn’t ask Ona in the right way. More likely the latter.

2.) I used OpenDNS and GoogleDNS as the endpoints to check for network connection. Ona added its own list of example endpoints and they were https connections. However, there are some issues with connecting to an https endpoint within Elixir. That is when I first ran the code I was getting SSL connection errors. A little digging helped me to find the answer but it was surprising to me that the Ona code defaulted to using SSL.

Overall though, it was a great experience and far easier and the code generated was far better than I anticipated. I mean I’ve tried a similar thing with Replit and it’s AI helper to build Rust code. I gave up after three attempts which all produced code that wouldn’t compile.

As I say, I’m still a LLM skeptic and I doubt that will change. But I’m also an engineer which means I try not to hold on to biases that interfere with solving problems. And, as I say, in this particular instance Ona impressed me.