Full Stack Devs PDX

Vibe coding: tips, tricks, and the tool landscape

Everyone in the room is already coding with AI. Almost nobody agrees on how to do it well — and the gap between the developer getting real leverage and the one getting expensive rework is no longer access to the tools. It's technique.

Last month we put a model in the product. This month we point the models at our own codebases. We'll start with the one idea everything follows from — generating code got cheap, and checking it didn't — then walk through nine specific, usable tips: the twenty-minute memory file that makes every future session smarter, how to make an agent plan before it touches a file, why three failed corrections means restart instead of argue, and how to read a diff a stranger wrote. Each one comes with a line you can copy.

Then we stop talking and do it. We'll take a real prompt from the room and fix it live against an eight-point rubric, and I'll run a real task on a real repo on screen — including the parts where the agent does something dumb, because knowing what that looks like is half the skill.

You'll leave with three things to change on Monday morning, and a set of offline pages — the tips, the prompt rubric, and a ten-tool comparison matrix — to take with you.

Bring one prompt that disappointed you this week, and one task you have to do next week. We'll use both.
Come curious. Beginners and veterans welcome. ☕

⭐ Speaker Details
Matt Duffield is President & CTO of Summit Software with 30+ years building enterprise software. A published author of six technical books and U.S. Navy veteran, he now focuses on AI-assisted development, local LLMs, and cloud-native architecture — and mentors the next generation of coders in his spare time.

🎪 Event Details
Food, drinks, and conversation beginning at 7:00. The talk begins around 7:30.
Parking is free at the Gladstone Park SDA church.