Collaborator Profile – Mike Griggs

About Mike Griggs

Mike brings more than three decades of experience across design, animation, visual effects, museum installations, exhibitions, and corporate media production. With a career spanning multiple creative disciplines, he has worked across everything from image-making and animation through to large-scale visual communication projects, while also contributing regularly to industry publications such as ImagineFX and 3D World magazine. Although he never considered himself a traditional programmer, his experience leading development teams and collaborating with technical artists gave him a strong understanding of how software and production pipelines function,  something that made the transition into AI-assisted coding feel surprisingly natural.

For Mike, the appeal of vibe coding is simple: it allows him to bring ideas to life that previously existed only in his head, without needing to become a full-time coder himself. Coming from a design and leadership background rather than a software engineering one, he sees AI coding as a transformative bridge between creative direction and technical execution. Skills such as understanding briefs, directing teams, and communicating ideas clearly have become unexpectedly valuable in the AI era, where prompting and guiding systems effectively can often matter more than writing syntax manually. While he explored AI more broadly through online courses, LinkedIn Learning, and self-guided research, his approach to vibe coding itself has remained largely hands-on and experimental.

Despite his enthusiasm, Mike also acknowledges the familiar unpredictability of AI systems, describing them as having an “eager puppy” quality — often rushing ahead enthusiastically but not always delivering exactly what was intended. However, compared to image generation or general productivity AI, he feels vibe coding offers a more direct and controllable feedback loop, making it easier to steer outcomes toward something useful. His advice to others is concise but important: don’t assume the first AI-generated solution is the correct one. For him, one of the most exciting aspects of AI-assisted coding is the ability to create bespoke tools and workflows tailored to specific creative problems, provided users are willing to iterate, refine, and direct the process thoughtfully.