We vibe-coded a custom AI poetry lab. Here's how you can, too.

Students used a web interface containing two chat-room windows labeled “the structured studio” and “the exploratory atelier.” Both rooms ran the same AI chatbot for co-writing English poems, but the chatbot behaved differently in each room. The project asked how teachers could use AI to help learners write poetry in English and how different AI configurations shape creativity during co-writing. Generic chatbots were not sufficient because they lacked control over key parameters, systematic conversation logging, and experimental condition setup. A custom platform was built using “vibe coding” with Lovable, generating a web app with a database, authentication, and conversation logging, plus controls for adjusting experimental conditions.

"Last November, our poetry students walked into the computer laboratory and found something new: a web interface with chat-room windows labelled “the structured studio” and “the exploratory atelier”. Each chat room ran the same artificial-intelligence chatbot that students could use to co-write poems in English, but the chatbot behaved differently between the two. In one case, the chatbot took creative risks, pushing students towards surprising metaphors; in the other, it was cautious and literal."

"Our project began with a simple question: how can teachers use AI to help learners write poetry in English? We wanted to explore how different AI configurations shape creativity when students co-write poems with chatbots. We could have pointed our participants towards OpenAI's ChatGPT, but generic chatbots don't offer control over key parameters that drive AI behaviour, systematic conversation logging and ways to set up experimental conditions. We needed a custom platform - and none of us had the coding experience to build one. So, we turned to 'vibe coding'."

"Vibe coding is the process of describing, in plain English, the software that you want to develop to an AI tool and letting it write the required code. Using Lovable, an AI coding assistant that turns written instructions into working web applications, we laid out our requirements: two chat rooms with different AI settings, a clean interface, conversation logging and controls for adjusting our experimental conditions. Lovable generated a working web app with a back-end database for data storage, authentication and conversation logging."

Read at Nature