My wife, not a coder, had her first vibe coding session tonight and she’s gone from AI is going to take our jobs and is a terrible thing to wow this is amazing, we could totally make money with some ideas I’ve got. Quite the turnaround.

Tonight’s session was spawned off by the need to scrape a bunch of genealogical data from a website covering her ancestral lines. I was showing her how to do things with Linux, Claude, Python, and the genealogy website. She did most of vibe coding with coaching from me. She was able to get a scraper together that seems to be scraping the data properly and storing it in a standard format that can be imported elsewhere, which we tested.

I was curious what software the genealogy website was running and it turns out that it’s just a translator from GEDCOM to HTML. We need the data in GEDCOM format so I suggested we reach out to the guy who owns the website and ask if we could get a copy of the complete database. She’s emailed him before and had some correspondence over the years but nothing recent so she asks if he’s still alive since he was getting up there in years. Turns out he passed away one week ago. His funeral hasn’t even happened yet. So since he’s very unlikely to object to us downloading the data, now the mad dash is on to scrape the data and convert it back to GEDCOM format before his family shuts down his website and we lose access to the data. The script is currently scraping away.

She had a good time tonight and learned a few things along the way. Maybe I need to show her how to get running with Nostr next. :-)

GN all.