Rubber Duck Thursday!

Key Concepts

• Rabida Duck Thursday: A chill coding stream for learning, vibing, and Q&A.
• GitHub Copilot: An AI coding assistant used for various tasks including code generation, commit message generation, and project setup.
• Gemini: An AI model favored for its verbose, thoughtful answers, ability to challenge ideas, and larger context window, particularly useful for ideation and flow analysis.
• Next.js: A React framework used for building the web application.
• Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework, noted for its ease of use with AI tools compared to native CSS, despite initial setup challenges.
• Spec Kit: A new toolkit from GitHub for spec-driven development, aiding in planning AI-powered projects.
• Git Merge: A conference focused on all things Git, hosted at GitHub HQ.
• Atlassian Forge: A platform for building extensions for Atlassian products like Jira.
• Content Spark (Tinder for Content Ideas): The project built during the stream, designed to help content creators generate niche ideas from broad topics using a swiping interface.
• AI Ethics: A topic discussed in the context of content generation and the broader implications of AI.
• Synth ID: A concept for identifying AI-generated content, discussed in light of increasingly realistic AI-generated videos.
• Phased Development: A methodology for breaking down project requirements into manageable stages for efficient AI-assisted building.

1. Introduction and Welcome to Rabida Duck Thursday

The stream, hosted by Cadesa, is a relaxed session for coding, learning, and interaction. Viewers are encouraged to ask questions, share knowledge, and engage. Today's session features a special guest, Bri Hall, who joins to build a project live. The stream aims to be a "chill stream" where participants "vibe code" and learn together.

2. GitHub Updates and News

Cadesa reviews the GitHub change log, highlighting recent developments:

• 20 Years of Git / Git Merge 2025: GitHub colleague Lee hosted Git Merge 2025 at GitHub HQ, a conference for Git maintainers and enthusiasts.
• GitHub Copilot Coding Agent and Mobile: Mentioned as a tool for completing urgent fixes.
• Accessibility Governance: A blog post on how GitHub enabled accessibility governance, referencing "spec-driven development" and a new toolkit called Spec Kit. Spec Kit helps plan projects for better AI integration, allowing users to "plan out everything properly."
• Python 3.14 Release: Noted as a recent release.
• Claude Sonnet 3.5 Deprecation: Claude Sonnet 3.5 will be deprecated from GitHub Copilot experiences on November 6th, 2025. Cadesa expresses fondness for this model, despite having access to newer versions.
• Social Login with Apple: GitHub now supports creating new accounts or linking existing ones using Apple or Google credentials.
• Copilot CLI: Highlighted as a significant recent release, previously explored on the stream.

3. Guest Introduction: Bri Hall and the "Tinder for Content Ideas" Project

Bri Hall, a Senior Developer Advocate at Atlassian, is introduced. She specializes in web development, making the web "cuter," and content creation. Bri shares her "toxic trait" as an engineer: building solutions for any problem she encounters, often for services she enjoys but doesn't want to pay for.

The project for the day is "Tinder for content creation ideas," aiming to help content creators narrow down broad ideas into niche, actionable content. Bri's goal is to build something people can "play with" to spark ideas, rather than a fully polished, production-ready application.

4. Project Setup and Ideation Phase with AI

Bri outlines her development methodology:

• VS Code and Copilot: Her primary tools.
• Features File (Phased Development): Bri uses a single file to define project requirements, broken down into phases. This helps narrow the scope and provides context for AI tools, allowing them to "think ahead" and plan architecture. She typically focuses on one or two core features at a time to avoid overwhelming the process.
• Gemini for Ideation: Bri chose Gemini over ChatGPT for the ideation phase because Gemini provides "more verbose and thoughtful answers," is better at challenging ideas, and has a larger context window. She uses it to assess feasibility ("is this possible?") and break down complex ideas. Cadesa agrees, noting Gemini's ability to understand video inputs and its "intellectual" cadence.
• Initial Project Setup: Bri uses Copilot to set up a Next.js project with Tailwind CSS. She notes her preference for Astro for smaller projects due to its framework agnosticism and lightweight nature, but uses Next.js for its features in her current role.

Challenges with Tailwind CSS Setup:

• Bri and Cadesa discuss the recurring difficulty of setting up Tailwind CSS with AI tools, especially with the transition to Tailwind v4 (which emphasizes native CSS over JavaScript configuration). AI models, often trained on older methods, struggle with the newer CSS-based setup, leading to "spaghetti native CSS" and specificity issues.
• The initial setup encountered issues where Tailwind styles were not applied, requiring server restarts and manual debugging. This led to a discussion about the reality of development, where things "hardly ever work the first time."
• Bri mentions creating template repos for common setups like Tailwind to streamline future projects.

5. Building the UI and API Integration

• Intake Form Development: The team moves to Phase 2, focusing on the UI setup. The goal is to create an intake form where users define their content preferences (niche, topics, keywords, content type, tone) before generating ideas.
• OpenAI API Integration: The application integrates with the OpenAI API to send user preferences and receive content recommendations.
• API Key Security: Cadesa emphasizes the importance of hiding API keys, a common security concern in development.
• Debugging API Errors: During testing, the application initially returned 404 and 500 server errors, indicating issues with the API route and internal code. Copilot was used to add logging and fix these issues, eventually leading to a functional submission form.

6. Implementing Swiping Logic and Idea Generation

• Swiping Interface: Phase 3 involves building the swiping interface and logic. The application uses animation (likely Framer or GSAP) for the swiping motion. Users can swipe through generated content ideas.
• Niche Idea Generation: The final phase (Phase 4) focuses on generating a list of more niche content ideas based on the user's initial preferences and swiped cards.
• Content Strategy Framework: Bri explains the practical application: taking one broad content idea (e.g., "Ultimate Guide to AI Ethics and Technology") and expanding it into a week's worth of niche subtopics (e.g., "AI in Healthcare," "Ethical AI Development," "Future of AI"). This helps content creators avoid "rethinking the whole wheel every single day."

7. Design Process and AI's Role

• Design Inspiration: Bri used Pinterest to find a mood board for a "rainbow and cute website."
• AI for Design Implementation: She then fed this image to Gemini, asking it to describe the "mood" in terms of brand identity and website elements. Gemini helped select whimsical Google fonts, colors from the image, recognized rounded borders, and assisted with SVGs and shadows (using Tailwind utilities).
• Efficiency: Bri notes that AI handled the "hard work" of initial styling, allowing her to focus on refining the design, which she enjoys.

8. Reflections on AI Development and Future Plans

• Speed of Development: Both Cadesa and Bri marvel at the speed of building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in under an hour with AI tools, a process that would have taken "hours on days" previously.
• AI Tiers for Developers: Cadesa proposes a tiered approach to AI tools:
  • Tier 1 (Beginner): Tools like Lovable, GitHub Spark for quick app building with no coding experience.
  • Tier 2 (Intermediate): Tools like Replit.
  • Tier 3 (Advanced): Tools like GitHub Copilot, Copilot CLI, Claude Code for developers with existing coding knowledge.
• Challenges for Beginners: Padma asks about the difficulty for someone with zero developer experience. Bri explains that while natural language prompts are accessible, debugging, understanding architecture, and security nuances (like API key exposure) would be challenging without prior coding knowledge.
• Bri's Personal Projects:
  • Rebuilding her personal site to consolidate short-form, long-form, and blog content on her own domain for ownership and longevity. The challenge is UX design for mixed content types.
  • Learning Atlassian Forge to create extensions for Jira, aiming to educate others on this capability.
• AI-Generated Content Detection: The discussion touches on the increasing realism of AI-generated videos (e.g., "Will Smith eating spaghetti," "Door Dash cat," a "subway couple" video that duped Cadesa). The need for tools like Synth ID or other methods to detect AI-generated content is highlighted, as current "subtle digital artifacts" are hard for the human eye to discern.
• Bri's Commitment to Ship: Bri expresses her intention to ship the "Tinder for content ideas" app, acknowledging the remaining styling work and the cost of API tokens.

9. GitHub Universe Promotion and Conclusion

• Bri's GitHub Universe Session: Bri will be speaking at GitHub Universe on a session titled "Build Once and Teach Forever: Scaling Developer Content Creation with GitHub." It will be a workshop focused on building systems to streamline content creation from a single code sample or idea using GitHub tools.
• GitHub Universe Tickets: Virtual tickets are free, and in-person attendees are encouraged to connect with Cadesa and Bri.
• Final Takeaways: The session concludes with appreciation for the audience and the successful demonstration of building a functional application with AI tools, emphasizing that debugging and real-world development challenges are part of the process. Bri is encouraged to ship her application due to strong audience interest.

Synthesis/Conclusion

This Rabida Duck Thursday stream provided a practical and insightful demonstration of building a web application, "Tinder for Content Ideas," from concept to a functional MVP using GitHub Copilot and other AI tools. The session highlighted the significant acceleration AI brings to development, enabling rapid iteration and project setup. Key takeaways included the importance of structured planning (phased development) for effective AI collaboration, the nuanced differences between AI models like Gemini and ChatGPT for specific tasks (ideation vs. general chat), and the practical challenges of integrating AI (e.g., debugging persistent issues with frameworks like Tailwind CSS). The discussion also touched upon broader implications of AI, such as content ownership, the need for AI-generated content detection, and the evolving landscape of developer tools. Ultimately, the stream showcased how AI can act as a powerful "bestie" for developers, streamlining workflows and allowing them to focus on creative problem-solving and design, even amidst real-world debugging scenarios.