I’m not a developer! I’ve never coded anything in my life. As far as I’m concerned, a Cloudtop is what you see outside an airplane window. Python is a snake.
But I’ve got a can-do attitude, so I decided to tackle vibe coding. Not because these new, futuristic development tools have democratized access to software design, and opened the door to a whole new cohort to design and deploy custom-made tools: that’s cool, but it had always felt cool in an abstract way. Developers are always doing cool stuff that has nothing to do with me.
I decided to start vibe coding because I hate making calendar invitations out of travel itineraries.
It’s boring, and time consuming, and if you don’t get all of the details right, your boss could end up stranded in Hong Kong. I have to do it nearly every week. I was staring down a multi-leg, multi-country trip, with multiple hotels and half a dozen different time zones, and as I was mentally cataloguing all of the things I’d rather do than put this stuff on calendar, a new line item popped up:
- Vibe code an app to do it for me?
In this video, I take you through my process of vibe coding for the very first time. My prompts were bad, AI Studio’s output was initially VERY confused, but in spite of my total lack of experience, I had a working app in under two hours! Join me for six minutes if you’d like to see me get there.
Top comments (4)
I’ve seen this pattern a lot. The first version always looks done, but the edge cases show up later. Especially with travel flows where nothing stays fixed. One small change in itinerary and the whole structure needs rewiring.
I've definitely found that with this tool, yeah. It's seen pretty good adoption in my work group, and it goes through cycles of working and needing to be fixed. Our travel booking app changed the format for itineraries recently, and the app couldn't parse the new layout. But I've found it pretty easy to keep it up to date; every time it breaks, or there's some new edge case it doesn't know how to handle (recent ex: I don't tend to rent a lot of cars for my executives, so I never taught it to understand Avis pick ups and drop offs), I get a ping from the user, I ask for the text of the itinerary they were trying to put through, and I go back into AI Studio and give it the new text, and tell it what went wrong. Updating the app takes about five minutes, and it only comes up every few weeks.
Software maintenance has been probably the most traditionally "dev-like" part of this experience, so far!
we should never stop learning congratz
This is exactly the energy we need more of! The best tools get built by the people who actually feel the pain. Calendar invitations from itineraries sounds deceptively simple until you're the one doing it for the fifth time that week. Can't wait to watch — two hours from "Python is a snake" to working app is genuinely impressive.