Adam Hyde built two scholarly publishing platforms largely by "vibe coding" with Anthropic's Claude: EasyJournal, a conventional system in the mould of OJS and Janeway, and Kotahi, a collaborative-first alternative with non-linear, communication-driven workflows.
Benefits & outcomes
Proof that one person can build a multitenant journal platform with AI assistance.
Kotahi supports concurrent workflows and real-time collaboration.
A working critique of the "digital conveyor belt" model baked into legacy systems.
Notes & quotes
“Vibe coding… really started to get better with the evolution of agent implementations and increasing utility of Anthropic’s LLMs.”
“EasyJournal is just a bad way of doing things… It's fundamentally dumb.” — Hyde, on deliberately replicating the conventional model
“Kotahi… offers everything expected from conventional journal systems while emphasizing smart, communicative collaboration.”
From Adam Hyde's "Vibe Coding for Publishers" workshop slides (PurePub.ai, 23 Apr 2026): EasyJournal launched Feb 2025 as a deliberate test of how far pure vibe coding could go, benchmarked against Janeway and OJS with "no code peeking"; v2.easyjournal.org was then rebuilt AI-native by design rather than bolted on. Hyde reports ~100 platforms vibe-coded and ~60 publishing professionals taught (vibecodingworkshops.com, founded Mar 2025), works mainly in Replit, and frames the method as "Expert Driven Development" (the expert building the tool is also the one using it) with an AI-assisted testing loop he calls the "Bela" method. Term "vibe coding" coined by Andrej Karpathy, Feb 2025.
Publisher / company: Adam Hyde / Robots Cooking
Date of mention: 29/03/2025
Source: https://www.robotscooking.com/building-legacy-with-ai/