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

The dog that ushered me into the technological future was “low and thick.” That’s all my mother registered before it T-boned her in a city park earlier this year: dense, heavy, and traveling fast enough to fracture her right tibia. But enough about her. Let’s discuss what this set in motion in my life: Having successfully learned nothing about coding for two and a half decades, I would soon be attempting my very first software development project.

If you’ve ever had a low and thick dog break your mom’s shin bone, you know the stream of lesser indignities that follows. Case in point: the hours my father spent navigating phone trees, trying to manage my mom’s medical care. Are frustrating telephone calls significant in the grand scheme of things? No. But that stupid dog had chosen a technologically interesting moment to do its thing. For the first time in history, a problem no longer needed to be serious to bring serious tools to bear.

For as long as Silicon Valley has been selling a frictionless tomorrow, we ordinary people have been its passive shoppers—scrolling the App Store, hoping someone has gone to the trouble of building whatever we need. Enter AI and its democratizing sidekick: vibe coding. If the promise is real, suddenly we can build our own apps, as niche and trifling as we please, with zero programming skills. We merely gesture toward whatever irks us and a constellation of large language models, code generators, and development environments will click their heels.

Niche and trifling? That’s me! Where others vibe code résumé reviewers and inventory trackers and automated assistants to boost their work productivity, I had a different target in mind. Over the past couple years I’ve grown particularly fixated, personally and professionally, on what the policy world calls sludge: the rising tide of tiny administrative obligations that increasingly seems to define modern existence—and corrode our ability to get anything done. The hassle of dealing with insurance, or connecting that insurance to your doctor, or staying on top of airline miles, or navigating your kid’s school portal. The steps required to dispute a charge, or unsubscribe from a streaming service you forgot you had. Each of these feels like its own discrete assault on our time. But they’re not discrete. They’re separate mushrooms sprouting from the same mycorrhizal network.

In a way this is a calibration issue. While bigger problems might at least theoretically attract attention—legislation, journalism, a Senate hearing—the smaller ones, too petty to litigate, simply become a fact of life. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but when it comes to fighting a one-dollar bank fee, it bends toward hold music.

Which is where the fantasy of vibe coding captured my attention. Those hassles aren’t just accidental byproducts of complexity; they’re often features. A confusing portal, a dropped call, a process just opaque enough to discourage follow-through. At scale, they function less like bugs than like policy. The app I envisioned would expose this phenomenon, make the cumulative weight of these obligations a little harder to ignore. The image I’d like you to summon is a field of mushrooms trembling.

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.

I spent the next hour ironing out kinks. Some fixes Claude could make, some it had me make. I understood nothing and was merely following orders (while also being the one who gave out the orders). But steadily we made headway, and help—confident, reassuring, clear—was always a whimper away:

ME: I got through step 3 above, but I’m getting confused at step 4. Here’s a screen shot of what I’m seeing after I clicked Settings.

CLAUDE: Good news - you’re in the right place, and very close. But I can see Supabase has updated their interface since I wrote those instructions. What you’re looking at is their new API keys screen, which is slightly different from what I described …

The experience was akin to building an elaborate Lego creation: You don’t know what each individual Ribbed Hose or Flared Mudguard does, but if you follow the directions to a tee, the thing does get built.

Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates: I assume these guys could only borrow their moms’ computers for so long. After a couple hours, I told Claude we’d pick up again soon.

I drove home giddy—a giddiness I recognized from a brief arc-welding phase in my twenties. I can’t believe I, a regular person, can make this! For all the websites and apps I whip through on a given day, they’ve always been mysterious to me—pyramids erected by an unfathomable priesthood. Suddenly I was a pyramid builder.

I wasn’t alone. Someone in Florida had recently built something called Stratus, a guitar pedal that lets players describe an effect in plain English—“give me a wobbly tremolo with a warm Mellotron feel”—and generates it. Elsewhere a guy named Justin had built a Plywood Cutting Visualizer—enter the dimensions of a sheet, get back the cuts. Someone else had made MIXCARD, which turns your Spotify playlists into physical postcards. The barrier between idea and creation had, for a certain kind of person with a certain kind of afternoon, effectively dissolved.

But this was also the catch. What happens when anyone with a passing itch builds their own app? Those environmental, political, and economic concerns came roaring back—accompanied by a new worry.

Before the pandemic, I began having friends over for a ritual I called Admin Night. The idea is to power through your personal sludge in communion wit