i vibecoded my first toy project
Even though I've been (ab)using Claude at work, until recently I had not yet decided to extend the vibing to my personal life. There's been much talk about the benefits of being able to vibe code everything, stoking fears of the entire SAAS industry losing its value overnight (which is a bit out of the scope of this note).
For me however, I just haven't had the need to for most of my hobbies. I play games (usually a host of community tools already exist) or workout (not much software needed here, for the better) as my main interests, or browse blogs and social media. I was tempted to create a LinkedIn scraper for job prospects, but the hard workers at Microsoft have apparently made it very difficult to scrape 1, so that project died as an idea.
I did however finally find that several of my friend groups were using Google sheets as a shared theorycrafting ground since we were participating in an in-game tournament, which made me want to at least trial some vibecoding. After about 2 hours of prompting, the site was done, backed by a Supabase backend and a CSV containing the rules, with no coding from yours truly.
While I didn't quite add everything needed (I didn't want to get into the headache of websockets), for a quick 2 hour session the tool was quite practical and worked well!
What immediately stood out to me was the ease of usage. While there were some bugs, they were easily addressed by a few bug lists submitted to Claude.
The code itself was (obviously) not perfect, even in such a small project's context. Claude kept trying to hack its way through a bug instead of fixing it holistically (one example included refusal to lift state and instead passing callbacks back and forth). But does that matter to the end user? To my friends, the site worked exactly as expected.
My main takeaway from this process so far is that while agentic coding is highly functional, the barrier is simply the idea and maintenance. Firing up a few prompts once in awhile is easy; keeping 10 vibecoded apps deployed and up to date is something else. Still, I'm looking forwards to doing this again - now I just need an ideas guy!
apparently instead of fixing the UI↩