So this is my entry to a prompt "Write about a system you built for your life you are very happy with" I got at an Indie Web Meetup.
So, I vibe coded a todo app? Yay, big deal. No seriously, this is definitely a big deal for me, or was when I was suffering through what I feel was the biggest anxious phase of my life.
anxiety
This year sucks. Apart from wars, war crimes, loss of life, financial uppending by an orange fart ball, gaming industry crisis, human-caused "natural" disasters, I personally also suddenly felt a historically famous, crisis of purpose. AI Agents have indeed become so good that with enough tokens and relevant context, you can indeed get them to build you whatever software you want. I really felt the pain of being perceived as irrelevant and redundant, despite still having a job (so far) and having institutional knowledge. Not to toot my own horn but I spoke publicly about cool stuff we did at Swiggy and what not. It was very easy to go into spirals of "but then what's the point of it when it can be done by a prompt".
I had briefly read about a talk by a fellow member of the tech community talking about ego coding and without even viewing it, I felt immense pain even thinking about the title. I was indeed suffering from "Ego coding" blues. I wanted MYSELF to write code, and now indeed AI was sometimes, not always, better or faster than me. I was in despair and had lost any will to do anything.
One of my colleagues at work had a different response to this dread. They immersed themselves in work, did so much in a day that one would usually do over a month thanks to this agentic superpower. Man I was super scared to open slack and see their multiple PRs in a day with beautiful screenshots of before/after. It didn't look sloppy, it wasn't coded in a sloppy way either. It was literally their blood, sweat, tears and tokens.
wait, where is this going?
Yeah, so amidst all this, therapy was one place for me to understand why suddenly I had the urge to become a driver, or open up a cafe with my savings, or buy a fleet of cabs and earn my living that could be protected from AI. Now I am not trying to tell you I have cured my anxiety, for it often is a signal of some other underlying fears, but I want to talk about a system that helped me calm down a bit, put my head down and focus on getting work done. This is a coping mechanism, not the ultimate fix.
a todo app?
So to fight the daemon of anxiety triggered by AI, I used AI to create a todo app, like one does. Now this wasn't an ordinary todo app, it was something I really wanted for myself. I wanted to have a list of things I want to do today and see the progress I made, not in comparison to my peers, or the world at large, just what wasn't done at the start of the day, and was indeed done by the end. I also wanted to perceive movement which was getting dimmed in the noise of work slack and doom posts of reddit. So I wanted to write a sentence or two about my reflections of the day, and a rating. Some days were 1/10, some were 9/10, and this granularity helped me answer the loud critic in my head asking me "what have you done?".
I (asked the LLM to write) wrote it in Swift, even though I have 0 clue about how that language works. I wanted it for my mac using mac aesthetics, I didn't want to run electron, so Swift it was. Honestly, I had no cognitive batteries to really learn anything new or do anything, but I wanted a wonky gratitude journal that I would actually use.
I also wanted to have pictures of Marianne North, after being enamored by her art as seen in Kew Gardens. So I got it added too. These calmed me.
BTW, can we just talk about how cool and uber rich Marianne North was? Like she/they traveled 6 continents in her/their 40s, creating immense art and pursuing botany. Why can't the rich of 21st century do that instead?
I then also added more features to it, a 20-minute break reminder to do my ergonomic exercises, a sound mixer coz why not, and so on.
does it work?
I have been using it almost daily, and my daily ratings have definitely improved. I was able to manage my catastrophizing mind, and get things done, irrespective of what my environment felt about it.
It also surprisingly did something different, it also helped me understand what vibe coding can actually feel like. I would never have been able to learn Swift, code the app the way it is, or build all these features overnight, in fact I doubt I would be able to do it using electron either, with this polish or at this pace. It helped me truly experience parts of this tweet, especially the "embrace exponentials". I really understood the devil I was fighting better, and came to some level of acceptance of the new reality. Life is about change, and change is painful, and change also becomes the new normal.
Also, I am sure anyone could vibe code a Swift app, or I could've built this app with enough time and cognitive resources. But something tells me, there is still some degree of analytical and problem-solving skill required to get to a desired end state. To describe a problem and convince a machine to solve it via lexicography doesn't really change, be it tyop rieeden sklloppy engrish or sophisticated arcane assembly language. (No this post is not sponsored by your favorite ClosedThropicPilot, ain't nobody paying me to shill).
fin
I feel less anxious now, I am able to work a bit more peacefully, and I see agentic coding as yet another form of coding, where the syntax is high level system design. Therapy did most of it, this todo app helped a bit, and the rest was growing pains.