I use an app to put friction between myself and my phone web browser. It is a good way to break a bad habit but it's ridiculous, really, to use tech as a barrier to tech. My real preference, if I could, would be not to need a smart phone in the first place, but I live in a world where you get punished if you don't.
I cannot imagine ever, ever, ever wanting to vibecode anything, not for my household or personal life or anything else. The very idea of using anything with any sort of LLM input makes me feel ill. Any kind of LLM use replaces possible human encounters, expression, communication. Even seemingly trivial texts, like coding, are a field for human thought, expression, and culture, and even though I would very much struggle to program anything that's not super simple the very idea of having my thought being replaced by LLM output is extremely offensive to me, it's like being told I shouldn't learn new skills or think or have a voice. I don't think vibecoding can ever be a form of resistance. It's just another way of being complicit with a worldview where more and more inherently deep, complex activities (writing, communication, coding, art, design) are treated as trivial, subhuman and lacking social or cultural possibilities.
I appreciate the pushback! As someone who's programmed at various levels of abstraction, this feels more like e.g. using Wix to design a website, rather than learn CSS. For my own part, I want my kids to learn enough programming to 1) play with Project Euler problems and 2) understand what a computer can do and how it approaches it, but I'd be ok with them making some projects with vibecoding after learning fundamentals, just like it's ok if they make a website without handcoding the html.
Michaela, I'm really sympathetic about what you say about using tech as a barrier to tech (and re: Leah's point, my non-smartphone-but-more-computer-savvy husband has done various levels of coding and vibecoding and we both believe it's very important and valuable to know how computers work, etc.). I have a friend who uses ChatGPT to meal plan, and for myself, at least, I'd rather have the friction of less smooth meal planning.
You say your real preference would be to not need a smartphone — I wonder if you would be willing to talk more about that? I've been able to live well sans smartphone myself (including traveling internationally), but I know not everyone has had the breaks I've had, and I'd like to think through what would be helpful to others who wish they didn't need a smartphone (sometimes the friction is just too steep!). I also wonder what would be possible if people sans smartphones, or at least those who don't want to live in a world where not having a smartphone is like not having plumbing, banded together in some significant way! Anyway, would be curious to discuss that more with you. Feel free to DM me!
I was thinking about opening chapter of The Dignity of Dependence yesterday when taking the train back from my book tour stop in Santa Barbara. My seat was so uncomfortable because I am short and my feet could not reach the footrest!
If you had a hackathon for homemakers, I would want to create some guidance for maintaining the cleanliness of my home. I know there are lots of systems out there, but none that I've been able to make work for me. I want to be able to say "I care about floors but not really so much about dusting" and then have a schedule wherein I eventually get to dusting, but only every once in while (without completely forgetting about it until a kid points it out!) And maybe even schedule the current members of said household for different tasks depending on their schedules and available time. We don't all have equal capacity.
I struggle to keep in touch with people in general. I'd like an app that prompt me every day to send a message or a phone call to a friend or a family member whom I've not be in contact with for a long time. Ideally with an option to give different meanings to "long" for different persons.
One simple way to achieve this is to add an item to your to-do list like "Set up a time to catch up with <friend>" which recurs after a set period of time (e.g. 6 months) after it is completed. Most to-do list apps support such a feature; I know mine (Remember the Milk) certainly does -- you would just write "*after 6 months" and it would create a follow-up event 6 months after check it off.
Bonus: You can also use this sort of thing for reminders to pray for them too! Then log the prayer requests they share with you as notes on that recurring task...
Maybe this already exists, but I always wanted a photo album app - you can look at photos, maybe zoom in and out, maybe sort them into albums, and that's it. No editing, no sending, no Google lens, no NOTHING. Just swiping through photos, same level of functionality as flipping through a physical photo album. I'd love to be able to just hand that over to a kid.
This is wonderful. My son and I are doing something along similar lines, although perhaps more expansive in reach. You can read about it here.(https://www.keithlowery.com/p/for-the-succour-of-those-years) We're trying to help people establish a daily practice that maps their goals against their actual, observed digital life.
It's so fun for me, someone who has spent his entire adult life writing code, seeing people like you empowered by these agents to have a kind of freedom to do things for yourself. I love that.
Hmmm, something like that for other websites (Reddit or Facebook!) would be helpful. Being forced to slow down is so helpful.
I'd love a Household Hackathon! For some ideas, three newly coded projects in my household, which were assisted by Claude Code:
- Newly revived Pandemic Survival generator previously written by my husband but made compliant after 7 years of Android changes would have taken hours of work to fix.
- a homeschool schedule website, listing current schedules and upcoming subjects, worked on by my 12 year old daughter
- 'TidyBot' - take a picture and check if this room is clean (this I think was completely vibe coded) - the idea is to pass the phone to the kid in charge of straightening up a room to check it themselves once it's "done"
I realized in retrospect that made less sense than it did when I was typing it!
For the board game Pandemic, there is a competition at GenCon where teams of two face off against each other with the exact same roles, board setup, card draw, and infection deck. There's a limited number of events that can be used and this allows you to play a compliant game without having to manually set the deck every time - you just pick out your cards out of the supply instead. Originally, the winner of the Gen Con Pandemic Survival would represent the US at the international one (expenses paid!), and the grand prize was an all expenses paid trip to any place on the Pandemic board :) There's a new listing this year for it - but the slots are full.
My husband wrote the original app for us to practice in prep for the GenCon tournament (but that was pre-Covid). He basically asked Claude Code to fix his app to make it compliant with the modern versions of Android and it did so in the car from our local Chick-fil-A to Ascension Thursday Mass - in about half an hour it was usable again.
Oh very cool! We'll be at GenCon this year (including to run a special three-table session of Magpie Games' Masks, where each table is in a different time period and teen heroes warp between them).
Our sessions are full, but I enthusiastically recommend Masks as a great game for teen, adults, or both together. We always run sessions open to first timers.
As a homeschool mom, I would love a way to simultaneously search our 4 local libraries’ databases for a book. We go through stacks of books and I spend so much time combing through each individual website to find what we need.
I wonder if LLM-based tools are inviting people to recreate stuff that already exists, but is maybe hard to find? This isn't the first case I've heard of. (And we already know our hard-won Google searching skills have become basically meaningless due to SEO.)
I have been meaning to use AI to write a flexible, personalized meal planning app that then generates a grocery list, with ingredients accurately scaled to the number of people I am intending per meal. Ideally I would be able to sync the app and grocery list with my spouse. I have coding experience, but not with phone apps, and with three kids and one on the way I also do not have time to dive into the details of a new coding project!
I've now been using this extension for the past four days or so. It's great on sites like X and Facebook, introducing exactly the friction and reminder to pray that I want. But I'd personally really also like to use it to add friction to my compulsive checking of some (mostly sports) news sites, and it has a fatal flaw there: Every time I click a link, it adds the interstitial again. Somehow this doesn't happen on e.g. Facebook, even when I click on a friend's profile and the URL changes. But it isn't a problem with using it on the specific sports websites I check; it also occurs if you turn it on for NYTimes.com, for example. Click on a story and the interstitial pops up again.
This is great and I would use it for Substack, because this is the only any first "social media" I am on! Ido not use Chrome and would need that for DuckDuckGo. Is there a possibility for that? Or coud you share your prompts, so I can adapt them maybe?
How does vibecoding feel as compared with "actual" coding? It's been years since I touched a coding project, but for me, part of the fun is logicking out what my code needs to do and how.
Miss: that part is not present, and I want it to remain part of my life elsewhere, but this feels more like finding the right tool than building the right tool, and both are good parts of my life.
I use an app to put friction between myself and my phone web browser. It is a good way to break a bad habit but it's ridiculous, really, to use tech as a barrier to tech. My real preference, if I could, would be not to need a smart phone in the first place, but I live in a world where you get punished if you don't.
I cannot imagine ever, ever, ever wanting to vibecode anything, not for my household or personal life or anything else. The very idea of using anything with any sort of LLM input makes me feel ill. Any kind of LLM use replaces possible human encounters, expression, communication. Even seemingly trivial texts, like coding, are a field for human thought, expression, and culture, and even though I would very much struggle to program anything that's not super simple the very idea of having my thought being replaced by LLM output is extremely offensive to me, it's like being told I shouldn't learn new skills or think or have a voice. I don't think vibecoding can ever be a form of resistance. It's just another way of being complicit with a worldview where more and more inherently deep, complex activities (writing, communication, coding, art, design) are treated as trivial, subhuman and lacking social or cultural possibilities.
I appreciate the pushback! As someone who's programmed at various levels of abstraction, this feels more like e.g. using Wix to design a website, rather than learn CSS. For my own part, I want my kids to learn enough programming to 1) play with Project Euler problems and 2) understand what a computer can do and how it approaches it, but I'd be ok with them making some projects with vibecoding after learning fundamentals, just like it's ok if they make a website without handcoding the html.
Michaela, I'm really sympathetic about what you say about using tech as a barrier to tech (and re: Leah's point, my non-smartphone-but-more-computer-savvy husband has done various levels of coding and vibecoding and we both believe it's very important and valuable to know how computers work, etc.). I have a friend who uses ChatGPT to meal plan, and for myself, at least, I'd rather have the friction of less smooth meal planning.
You say your real preference would be to not need a smartphone — I wonder if you would be willing to talk more about that? I've been able to live well sans smartphone myself (including traveling internationally), but I know not everyone has had the breaks I've had, and I'd like to think through what would be helpful to others who wish they didn't need a smartphone (sometimes the friction is just too steep!). I also wonder what would be possible if people sans smartphones, or at least those who don't want to live in a world where not having a smartphone is like not having plumbing, banded together in some significant way! Anyway, would be curious to discuss that more with you. Feel free to DM me!
My feelings on using LLM chatbots are the same as yours, or very nearly so. I especially love your last sentence.
I was thinking about opening chapter of The Dignity of Dependence yesterday when taking the train back from my book tour stop in Santa Barbara. My seat was so uncomfortable because I am short and my feet could not reach the footrest!
If you had a hackathon for homemakers, I would want to create some guidance for maintaining the cleanliness of my home. I know there are lots of systems out there, but none that I've been able to make work for me. I want to be able to say "I care about floors but not really so much about dusting" and then have a schedule wherein I eventually get to dusting, but only every once in while (without completely forgetting about it until a kid points it out!) And maybe even schedule the current members of said household for different tasks depending on their schedules and available time. We don't all have equal capacity.
I struggle to keep in touch with people in general. I'd like an app that prompt me every day to send a message or a phone call to a friend or a family member whom I've not be in contact with for a long time. Ideally with an option to give different meanings to "long" for different persons.
I’ve been thinking about this too!
One simple way to achieve this is to add an item to your to-do list like "Set up a time to catch up with <friend>" which recurs after a set period of time (e.g. 6 months) after it is completed. Most to-do list apps support such a feature; I know mine (Remember the Milk) certainly does -- you would just write "*after 6 months" and it would create a follow-up event 6 months after check it off.
Bonus: You can also use this sort of thing for reminders to pray for them too! Then log the prayer requests they share with you as notes on that recurring task...
This assumes I have a to do list (maybe I should).
Maybe this already exists, but I always wanted a photo album app - you can look at photos, maybe zoom in and out, maybe sort them into albums, and that's it. No editing, no sending, no Google lens, no NOTHING. Just swiping through photos, same level of functionality as flipping through a physical photo album. I'd love to be able to just hand that over to a kid.
This is wonderful. My son and I are doing something along similar lines, although perhaps more expansive in reach. You can read about it here.(https://www.keithlowery.com/p/for-the-succour-of-those-years) We're trying to help people establish a daily practice that maps their goals against their actual, observed digital life.
It's so fun for me, someone who has spent his entire adult life writing code, seeing people like you empowered by these agents to have a kind of freedom to do things for yourself. I love that.
I really like the "librarian not an oracle" framing.
Hmmm, something like that for other websites (Reddit or Facebook!) would be helpful. Being forced to slow down is so helpful.
I'd love a Household Hackathon! For some ideas, three newly coded projects in my household, which were assisted by Claude Code:
- Newly revived Pandemic Survival generator previously written by my husband but made compliant after 7 years of Android changes would have taken hours of work to fix.
- a homeschool schedule website, listing current schedules and upcoming subjects, worked on by my 12 year old daughter
- 'TidyBot' - take a picture and check if this room is clean (this I think was completely vibe coded) - the idea is to pass the phone to the kid in charge of straightening up a room to check it themselves once it's "done"
You can customize my browser extension so it interrupts different websites. I just use it for twitter, but you can swap out different sites.
What was the "Pandemic Survival Generator"?
I realized in retrospect that made less sense than it did when I was typing it!
For the board game Pandemic, there is a competition at GenCon where teams of two face off against each other with the exact same roles, board setup, card draw, and infection deck. There's a limited number of events that can be used and this allows you to play a compliant game without having to manually set the deck every time - you just pick out your cards out of the supply instead. Originally, the winner of the Gen Con Pandemic Survival would represent the US at the international one (expenses paid!), and the grand prize was an all expenses paid trip to any place on the Pandemic board :) There's a new listing this year for it - but the slots are full.
My husband wrote the original app for us to practice in prep for the GenCon tournament (but that was pre-Covid). He basically asked Claude Code to fix his app to make it compliant with the modern versions of Android and it did so in the car from our local Chick-fil-A to Ascension Thursday Mass - in about half an hour it was usable again.
Oh very cool! We'll be at GenCon this year (including to run a special three-table session of Magpie Games' Masks, where each table is in a different time period and teen heroes warp between them).
Oh interesting! We do a lot of Pathfinder but haven't looked into Masks. Are there sessions open to beginners and/or teenagers?
Our sessions are full, but I enthusiastically recommend Masks as a great game for teen, adults, or both together. We always run sessions open to first timers.
As a homeschool mom, I would love a way to simultaneously search our 4 local libraries’ databases for a book. We go through stacks of books and I spend so much time combing through each individual website to find what we need.
That extension already exists! I use it all the time: https://www.libraryextension.com/
Oh my goodness, thank you!!!!
I wonder if LLM-based tools are inviting people to recreate stuff that already exists, but is maybe hard to find? This isn't the first case I've heard of. (And we already know our hard-won Google searching skills have become basically meaningless due to SEO.)
Leah you are really a Reinassance Man (well... Woman! 😂) from tabletop games to coding and stats to policymaking to the humanities!
LOVE. Glad you are thinking about and interrogating these things.
I have been meaning to use AI to write a flexible, personalized meal planning app that then generates a grocery list, with ingredients accurately scaled to the number of people I am intending per meal. Ideally I would be able to sync the app and grocery list with my spouse. I have coding experience, but not with phone apps, and with three kids and one on the way I also do not have time to dive into the details of a new coding project!
This is definitely the kind of thing you could mess around with with Claude Code/Cowork.
We have a pretty simple approach to groceries (a shared note with checkboxes we both edit)
I love the app Recipe Keeper, and it sounds like it has most of the features you need!
I've now been using this extension for the past four days or so. It's great on sites like X and Facebook, introducing exactly the friction and reminder to pray that I want. But I'd personally really also like to use it to add friction to my compulsive checking of some (mostly sports) news sites, and it has a fatal flaw there: Every time I click a link, it adds the interstitial again. Somehow this doesn't happen on e.g. Facebook, even when I click on a friend's profile and the URL changes. But it isn't a problem with using it on the specific sports websites I check; it also occurs if you turn it on for NYTimes.com, for example. Click on a story and the interstitial pops up again.
Any chance you could patch that? :)
This is great and I would use it for Substack, because this is the only any first "social media" I am on! Ido not use Chrome and would need that for DuckDuckGo. Is there a possibility for that? Or coud you share your prompts, so I can adapt them maybe?
Does DuckDuckGo have a browser as well as a search engine?
Came across this which looks to be in this vein:
https://www.keithlowery.com/p/for-the-succour-of-those-years
"The AI is a librarian, not an oracle" is good.
How does vibecoding feel as compared with "actual" coding? It's been years since I touched a coding project, but for me, part of the fun is logicking out what my code needs to do and how.
You totally miss that part (which I enjoy, too) at least for a simple project.
miss = that part is not present, the project is too easy?
miss = you notice and regret the absence of that part?
Miss: that part is not present, and I want it to remain part of my life elsewhere, but this feels more like finding the right tool than building the right tool, and both are good parts of my life.