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Building an Audio Plugin with Claude Code: A Vibe Coding Experiment
Josh tries “vibe coding” an audio plugin from scratch using Claude Code with no hand-written code, and shares what worked, what broke, and how the workflow shifted his mindset from developer to curator.
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Building an Audio Plugin with Claude Code: A Vibe Coding Experiment
Josh tries “vibe coding” an audio plugin from scratch using Claude Code with no hand-written code, and shares what worked, what broke, and how the workflow shifted his mindset from developer to curator.
Building an Audio Plugin with Claude Code: A Vibe Coding Experiment
Building an Audio Plugin with Claude Code: A Vibe Coding Experiment
I’ve been hearing about vibe coding for a while now, and it’s finally hit the audio programming world. So I decided to test it myself by building an audio plugin from scratch using Claude Code, with zero hand-written code. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and what surprised me about my own mindset along the way.
⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 - Vibe coding hits audio programming
00:20 - My confession: I've never tried this
00:58 - About The Audio Programmer
01:31 - Choosing an LLM and getting started
02:10 - First prompt: Building a basic gain plugin
03:24 - Setting up Claude Code step by step
05:27 - Troubleshooting the install
08:47 - Creating our project and launching Claude Code
10:57 - The magic prompt: Watching it scaffold everything
13:52 - First build and test — it works!
14:39 - Inspecting the code: What did it actually write?
15:43 - Refining: Adding dB scaling and logarithmic gain
18:13 - Getting the plugin into a DAW
20:57 - Testing with real audio
21:56 - Custom UI experiment: Rotary slider and styling
23:33 - Pushing the limits: Advanced look and feel
25:29 - Where the UI broke down
27:37 - What I learned: Psychology, workflow, and honest takeaways
29:08 - What's next for this series
🔗 Resources Mentioned:
Claude Code: https://claude.ai
JUCE Framework: https://juce.com
iPlug 2 (Oli Larkin): https://iplug2.github.io
CMake: https://cmake.org
Xcode (Mac): Available on the Mac App Store
Visual Studio (Windows): https://visualstudio.microsoft.com
📋 What I Used:
Claude Max planClaude Code (CLI tool)
JUCE framework (fetched via CMake)
Ableton Live (DAW testing)
Joshua Hodge
The Audio Programmer
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