About Gareth Volka

Gareth works across architecture, computational design, software, visualisation, and fashion. Alongside his role as a computational designer at Zaha Hadid Architects, he also runs his own 3D-printed fashion brand, Gareth Volka, which has been presented at London Fashion Week. His path into coding came through studying computer science and robotic engineering before eventually moving into architecture, where his interest in computer graphics, shaders, gaming, and visual systems found a more creative outlet. Although he describes himself as an average programmer in traditional computer science terms, he discovered that his strengths in geometry, mathematical logic, and visual problem solving became highly valuable within architectural design workflows.

For Gareth, AI-assisted coding has become less about replacing developers and more about accelerating the development process, particularly when working with complex APIs such as Revit or solving mathematical and geometry-based problems. He explains that early AI tools were unreliable and often hallucinated functions or syntax, but even then, they dramatically reduced the time spent searching documentation and troubleshooting workflows. Today, he sees modern LLMs as incredibly powerful creative and technical assistants, capable of generating entire projects in seconds. At the same time, he stresses that understanding the underlying code and development environment is still essential, especially for professional or production-level work where reliability matters.

Advice

His advice to people exploring vibe coding is to approach it as a creative tool rather than simply a shortcut. Gareth recommends starting with visually driven areas such as WebGL, shaders, and interactive graphics, where experimentation and immediate visual feedback make the learning process more engaging. While AI has made building things significantly faster, he believes the real challenge now is deciding what is worth creating in the first place.