I’m not yet sure how I feel about the term, “vibe coding”. Feels like someone doing it needs to be punched in the face just on principle. However, seeing as I’m now using AI to create apps from scratch solo, maybe I need a smack in the head.
In 2026, AI is blowing up like crazy. It seems every few days, there’s another breakthrough that makes it absurdly easy for me to replicate hours of hard work in seconds. Before I get too far into this, let’s acknowledge that this innovation comes at a price in that all this crazy computation has to happen somewhere. In most cases that’s a massive data center that either exists, is being built, or being proposed to the chagrin of locals and environmentalists. This pisses off the locals because these things use resources, require water for cooling (if they’re really cooking) and frankly data centers are big ugly buildings that suck off the teat of the power grid. Seems like AI could be used to try and figure ways for these things to live more harmoniously in the communities hosting them – however, that’s not the point of this post.
Plenty has and continues to be written about the advent of an AI-enabled society by people far smarter, more respected, better paid and erudite than I. My friend and frequent collaborator Robert Tercek comes to mind. Go read some of his articles, listen to his podcast, or watch a few of his recent speeches on the subject. In this post, I’m just making some observations based on my personal use and experience.
Let me preface by saying that maintaining a grasp on the AI space is about as fruitful as hanging onto a handful of water. Every major and minor name in the space is playing a rapid fire game of leapfrog making it hard to ensure you’re using the “latest and greatest” tool(s). They literally change every day. Like streaming services, they’ve figured out tiered pricing for the current model. Generally speaking, a typical pleb like me can get by with a “Pro” tier at around $20/mo. However, like streaming services, to ensure you don’t get FOMO, you’ll have to subscribe to several. Some are starting to bundle services together, but even then, restrictions are introduced. The biggest issue right now is these services run on tokens which represent computing cycles. If you’re doing something simple, it uses very few tokens. If you want to do something complicated, expect to burn through tokens like a fat kid going through french fries. As of this writing, I’m using Claude from Anthropic. Pro plan. I have two cutoff points. A timed daily ration if I surpass puts me in “time out” for a few hours before letting me continue. Then it has a weekly ration that resets every week. Imagine working with a software engineer that drops everything in the middle of a task and takes a four-hour “break”. Of course, Anthropic has an “out” in that you can dump extra cash in the engine to continue until you run out of those tokens. Like gambling, support groups are going to start popping up to address addictive token consumption.
I started using Claude Co-work by having it address my non-existent Excel chops and make a tracking worksheet for one of my clients. Now this worksheet isn’t doing anything that apps like Monday and ClickUp do out-of-the-box, but those services weren’t in the budget yet. In an afternoon, I had a colorful dashboard view of the company, in which each Department had a tab representing their contributions to the overall Mission and Vision of the company. It works as long as no one messes with it. Meaning, I can’t just stick it up on Google Sheets and let everyone go to town on their tabs. When I tried that, formulas broke everywhere. I spent another afternoon fixing what broke. Then determined I needed to be the sole person maintaining this worksheet on behalf of the others. That didn’t work out so well either. I was now breaking stuff myself with no one else to blame. Back to the long-suffering Claude to “fix it”. Finally, I had Claude make a form that scraped the contents of each departments’ tab and present it to the leads in a way that they could quickly update their status/initiatives in a way that I could update the worksheet without breaking it. This is going to work just fine for the next few months, but I’ve made clear up front that this is only a temporary fix, and some of our sales revenue should go toward using a “real” tool and retire the Excel kludge. Still, Claude did a great job with the limited resources that it had, and I looked like I knew my ass from my elbow in Excel.
I’ve been enjoying my Plex server and looking forward to facilitating group watching events. My most recent vibe coding project is creating a makeshift widget that acts as an informative and colorful Promotional Poster widget for WordPress or email signatures. Currently just web-only, version 1.1 has:
- Support for both Movies and Episodic TV Shows
- Metadata provided from The Movie Database (TMDB) using their public API
- Smart calendar that changes the widget from “Coming Soon” to “Now Playing” based on time
- Dark and light mode
- Three sizes of widgets
- One click info for synopsis, run-time, etc.
- Export as .PNG or Embed code for websites and HTML-formatted email
I built it in a couple sessions, each around an hour. I asked Claude to adhere to Apple’s Design Guide and Human Interface Guide when making the UI/UX, which yielded a nice, clean interface. The logo is just a quick prompt result from Firefly & Nano-banana. It will change to something nicer.
Note it requires a free API key from TMDB to generate widgets, but don’t let that stop you.
Next up will be a more ambitious v.2.0 which will be an actual native code Apple Widget. Hoping to be able to pin it on my wall in Apple Vision Pro.
Overall, my experience in vibe coding has been positive. I must say my years of experience as a product lead has given me an advantage in generating prompts emulating the form of Product Requirement Documents that allow the AI engine to generate remarkably passable first builds with only minor modifications to complete. One tip – at the end of a complete build, ask the AI to generate a changelog and summary for the next round. Then in the next round, have it refer to those docs to keep it from having to completely re-learn everything from the code level. Gotta conserve those tokens.
And just in case you’re worried about AI being smart enough to take over everything, note that the hipster dude “vibe coding” in the AI-generated featured image has three arms.
I think we’re OK for now.
