Why You Should Be Vibe Coding in Your Home Lab Right Now!

The phrase “vibe coding” is all around us and a lot of times it is in a negative light due to some of the changes going on in the industry right now as organizations try to figure out what impact AI will make on what they are looking for in hiring. However, if you haven’t tried vibe coding as of yet, you need to, like right now! Vibe coding can take your scripting and home labbing to the next level and unblock you from hurdles that you may have been facing before with things like Docker Compose, Kubernetes YAML, CI/CD, etc. Let’s see how you can get started vibe coding in your home lab today.

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is coding by natural language and “intention” rather than by strict syntax. Instead of writing out every line of code, you explain to AI or an AI agent what you want to achieve in natural language (think “create me a docker-compose file that….). The AI then interprets your request and produces the code or configuration needed to make it happen.

Think of it as having an extremely fast, software engineer at your disposal. The software engineer knows the nitty gritty details of writing YAML, Docker Compose, Terraform, or PowerShell scripts. Also, they can instantly respond to vague requests. You provide the “vibe” by way of natural language describing what you want, and AI provides the code.

This does not mean you lose control of your code, app, or IaC you are working on. You still give the oversight to your projects, review the result, test the code that is produced, and make it better and debug the code where needed. But the heavy lifting of syntax is offloaded to the AI and this can be a game changer. Let’s face it, most of us are not as good as we want to be in software coding. But, we know how to describe what we want.

Why vibe coding works well in a home lab

To me, one of the most well-suited places for vibe coding is the home lab. Home labs are purpose built to be a playground for technology enthusiasts. They are the perfect place to try these types of tools and workflows without affecting anything related to a production environment (even though many of us run a home lab like production. Vibe coding shines as great in the home lab due to the following:

• You can test ideas faster.
• You can experiment with complex setups without writing everything from scratch.
• You can fail quickly, iterate, and try again.
• You can save working outputs for later automation.

As a quick example, if you wanted to test out a monitoring stack, you might use a prompt like this:

create a Docker Compose file that deploys Prometheus, Grafana, and cAdvisor with persistent storage

With this prompt, AI will generate a ready-to-run YAML file. You can paste this into your environment. Even if you want to change things along the way like your network settings, you will have a boilerplate template of sorts to work with.

What are some projects in the home lab that you might vibe code?

Really the sky is the limit on what you can vibe code. But, there are several projects that make a lot of sense for home labbers to use vibe coding with. These include things such as the following:

• Docker Compose deployments – With most agentic coding tools, you can describe an app you want to run and let AI create the Compose file. For example, deploy Nextcloud with a MariaDB backend and use Traefik for handling SSL certificates
• Proxmox automation with Terraform – Instead of writing Terraform by hand, ask for “a Terraform script that deploys three Ubuntu VMs with static IPs on my management VLAN or something like that.
• Kubernetes clusters: Request a Helm chart for deploying one of your home lab apps you like to use like FreshRSS, etc. Also, you can use AI for help vibe coding the transformation for your Docker Compose code to Kubernetes YAML.
• Backup jobs and scripting: Generate PowerShell or Bash scripts to snapshot VMs or copy configs to your NAS or the cloud or something else.

With vibe coding, AI generates the syntax for your projects and let’s face it, who wants to be a professional YAML engineer? To me, this makes home labbing even more fun since you don’t have to get stuck in the nitty gritty details any longer of some syntax issue that you can find no documentation on. AI can dramatically help with that.

The benefits of vibe coding in the home lab

The obvious advantage here I think is speed. What might take hours or even days of Googling (I have done this before even giving up on a certain project for a time hoping that someone would write a blog about their success with it, etc), reading through obscure docs, and troubleshooting can be condensed down into a back and forth prompting session with AI.

Also, here are a few things I can think of as advantages:

• Learning – You may not think this, but you actually learn A LOT when you vibe code. Seeing how AI puts things together technically actually teaches you architecture and workflows of how to do things.
• Speed – Newcomers to home labs do not need to memorize every option in a YAML file. They can start with natural language and learn as they go which saves tons of time
• Creativity: When the barrier to trying something new is lower, you are more likely to experiment.
• Bootstrapping: You can go from an idea to working code very quickly

Are there drawbacks to vibe coding?

Like any tool, there can certainly be drawbacks to using it. It sounds like a magic button, but it actually isn’t that entirely. Vibe coding has limitations that can definitely bite you. While I do think the benefits far outweigh the limitations, here are a few of the limitations to consider.

• Accuracy: – AI is not infallible when it comes to coding. Sometimes it will try to use parameters or commands that don’t actually exist. So you have to test, test, test, and use prompts to push it sometimes to correct things that are not right.
• Models matter – I have seen this personally, the model you use does matter. Claude is what I have found to be the most accurate AI model for coding. The others are good, but Claude seems to be a notch above the others. l
• Bypassing git – Sometimes with vibe coding, since AI is doing most of the work actually writing code, you may not do your due diligence with committing changes to git. This can be a major drawback. Don’t sip code commits just because you are using AI and use meaningful commit messages to track what your changes are actually do. This way, if you have to roll back, you can do so to a known good state of your vibed code
• Security – Don’t forget about security. AI agents don’t always do the right thing when it comes to securing your code or not handing secrets the right way
• Context gaps – Keep in mind that AI may not fully understand your environment. You have to keep your architecture in mind when you are vibe coding a specific solution in IaC or other DevOps configurations.

These are not dealbreakers, but they highlight the need to treat vibe coding as an assistant rather than an autopilot that totally throws good programming practices to the side.

Vibe coding tools I recommend

Are there good vibe coding tools that I would recommend? Absolutely. There are a few that I have tried and that I like However here are the ones that I can definitely recommend as great tools to start using AI to create code for your home lab:

• Windsurf – A free tool that has a paid model that allows you to have several calls to AI models. Windsurf is basically an overlay over VS Code that looks natively like VS Code and allows you to have agentic coding agents that work for you in VS Code.
• Kilo Code – Like Windsurf, Kilo is an extension for VS Code that provides agentic coding. One difference with Kilo is that it is free and open source. You just pay for AI API credits. Also, just for signing up for Kilo they will give you $20 free credits.
• GitHub Copilot – Copilot is another one that is built right into VS Code and provides the now very popular agentic coding platform.
• Amazon Kiro – Kiro is a newcomer that is still in the early phases, but it is maturing quickly and will be Amazon’s answer to some of the other solutions on the market right now.

How do you get started?

For those that read my blogs regularly or see my videos, I am a big advocate for project-based learning. I don’t think there is any substitute for that. Projects that really mean something or accomplish something for you personally in a home lab are a great place to start. The main reason is the motivation is built into the project. It is something that can benefit you and your specific setup.

Follow these general steps or guidelines to tackle a new vibe coding project:

1. Decide what you want to do in your home lab or what you need. Maybe it is a Vaultwarden password manager as you have been wanting to self-host your passwords instead of using cloud services (there is your motivation)
2. Create a git repo that will contain your project files
   • Clone down the repo locally to where you are working in VS Code/AI agentic solution
3. Describe it to your AI prompt. Something like: “Write a Docker Compose file for Vaultwarden with persistent storage bind mount located at /opt/vaultwarden”
4. Commit and push this version of your code
5. Copy the generated code, run it, and see what happens on your Docker host
6. If there are errors, rinse and repeat. Tell AI that you encountered an error. Actually copy the output of the error into your AI prompt so the agent can see the exact wording of the error. This will help shortcut the debugging process.
7. Continue to work on the project until you have it running without errors and it does what you want it to do. Make your commit messages meaningful as this will allow you to easily roll back to a specific point in time if needed.

This workflow makes it easy to make MAJOR progress in the home lab with infrastructure as code projects you want to tackle.

Tips for success that I have learning when vibe coding projects in the home lab

There are a few things I would like to pass along that I have picked up along the way with vibe coding many projects at this point in the home lab.

• Always version your outputs – You can tell I am preaching this a lot. I can’t emphasize enough to not leave out Git as part of your vibe coding process.
• Start with a small project – Don’t tackle some earth-shatteringly big project for your first vibe coding project. Instead, start simple and small. As you learn the ropes and become successful vibe coding smaller projects, larger ones will come more naturally.
• Document as you go – Keep notes about the prompts you used and how you tweaked the code. As a side note, you can have AI agents do this for you as well and update the README.md files as they go. However, I will pass this advice along as well. You are burning tokens by having them write docs along the way. My philosophy is this. I tell the agents not to document anything until we get to a working version of the code. That way, you are not wasting time and tokens having it document code that may not even work.
• Check your security – Keep in mind that AI agent coding help may not have security as top of mind. Be sure to check this along the way and think about designing your code like it was in a sensitive production environment. Even set that context for the AI agent.

These are just a few of the things I can pass along for starting your first vibe coding project in your home lab. Ultimately, you will find the workflow that works for you and that may not work for someone else. However, in general there are best practices that tend to work for everyone when it comes to software development.

Wrapping it

While it may sound like it, vibe coding is not a gimmick or something that doesn’t work. It is a REAL thing that can allow you to create some very cool and powerful tools that are only limited by your own imagination. You have the ideas and creativity and AI has the technical coding skills to make it happen.

If you are running a home lab in 2025 and you want to start learning and take advantage of infrastructure as code and other tools and workflows that maybe you got stuck on before, vibe coding and the agentic AI age will easily unlock this for you. So, don’t wait, and start today! Let me know in the comments if you are vibe coding now in your lab environments. What tools are you using?