I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?

What my mom lacks in healthy legs, she makes up for in a Claude Pro subscription. Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.

I’d like to create a communally shared app that gathers and shares information related to how much time and energy we devote to fighting burdensome administrative tasks, bureaucratic sludge, Kafka-esque unsubscribe mazes, byzantine insurance portals, wrongful charges, denied claims, confusing membership plans, and the like.

With as much clarity and detail as I could muster, I proceeded to describe a dashboard that would record the scale and scope of our collective sludge. Users would log frustrating incidents from their lives, entering how much time they’d spent, how annoying it was, and what they’d rather have been doing. Every submission would be dopaminally rewarded with an inspiring resistance quote and a photo of a kitten, puppy, or baby chimp. I’d train Claude to generate some “wider context”—a paragraph discussing how the frustrating incident fits into systemic sludge patterns—and a complaint letter to the relevant regulatory bodies.

Claude noodled. Not for the first time, I feared my vibes would simply manifest an error page. I recalled, dimly, some of the advice I’d seen in Reddit forums: “I’d learn how computers and code works first.” “I’d look into going through harvards CS50.” “Instead of learning AWS or servers, use something like Kuberns.” I began to worry that vibe coding was a kind of stone soup: Sure, anyone can do it, you just first need a Harvard-level understanding of several dozen programming languages and cloud platforms.

That worry lasted about three Kuberns of a second. Claude stopped thinking and proceeded to explore what, by nature, it had to concede was an amazing concept: “This is a fantastic idea—genuinely useful, with a clear mission and a great sense of humor about a real problem. Let me give you an honest lay of the land before we dive in.”

A couple clarifying questions later, I was staring at a real interface. The “Log Incident” and “Dashboard” tabs didn’t work yet, we hadn’t arranged for the entries to be saved anywhere, and I still needed to teach Claude the wider context part. But the beginnings of an online app had materialized.