I Vibe-Coded an R&B App While DJing 2000s Classics

There's a certain kind of focus you only get when the music is right.

Not just any music — the right music. The kind that occupies exactly enough of your brain to silence the noise without taking the part that's doing the actual work.

For me, on this particular session, that music was 2000s R&B. Rihanna. Beyoncé. Ne-Yo. Keyshia Cole. 68 minutes of Stargate-produced warmth, smooth transitions, and hooks that I've known longer than I've known most of the people in my life.

I put the mix on. I opened my code editor. And for just over an hour, I built.

Watch the Mix

Why "Vibe Coding"?

The phrase has been around for a while in the builder community — it describes shipping while in flow state, letting momentum carry decisions rather than analysis. Some people use it loosely to mean any ambient-music coding session. I mean it more specifically.

Vibe coding, to me, is the deliberate act of creating conditions for focused work through intentional sensory input. Music isn't background noise in this framework — it's a tool. The BPM, the mood, the era of the music, all of it shapes the quality of the decisions you make during the session.

2000s R&B is, for me, a specific state inducer: warm, nostalgic, emotionally grounded. It puts me in a headspace of building things that feel good rather than just function correctly. That's exactly the energy R&B Vault needs.

The Setup

I DJ as DJ Demure — I've been playing sets and building mixes for years, and R&B culture is the foundation of why I'm building this platform. This session wasn't a gimmick. I actually set up the mixer, loaded the tracks, and ran the mix live while the code editor was open on the other screen.

The discipline: don't stop coding until the mix ends.

No pausing to overthink feature decisions. No going down documentation rabbit holes. No "should I refactor this first." Just: the track is playing, the mix is moving, and the feature has to ship before Keyshia Cole fades out.

The Tracklist

What Actually Got Built

R&B Vault is a platform for Oslo's R&B community — events, artists, quizzes, culture. In this session I worked on features I won't fully detail here (some aren't shipped yet), but the vibe of the session shaped what I built: things that feel right rather than things that are merely correct.

The music made the product decisions better. That sounds abstract until you've done it. Then it's obvious.

The Norwegian Connection

There's something I find endlessly pleasing about this session that I should make explicit: the Stargate producers — whose music carried this entire mix — are Norwegian. Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen from Trondheim.

I'm building R&B Vault in Oslo.

The sound that defined my creative session, that shaped the product decisions in real time, was made by two Norwegians who did the same thing in a different era: built something deeply inside R&B culture from a base in Scandinavia.

I'm not drawing a direct line. But I notice the parallel.

If you want to go deeper on the Stargate story — and you should, it's remarkable — read our full piece: Stargate: The Norwegians Who Defined 2000s R&B.

The Takeaway

Separate your creative ritual from your work session and you lose both. The ritual becomes procrastination. The work becomes grinding.

Merge them — deliberately, with the right music — and you get something that feels sustainable. You're not enduring the session. You're inside it.

That's what this was. One mix, one build, one state of mind.

Try it.

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R&B Vault is Oslo's R&B culture hub. Join the community at rnbvault.no.