That's still pretty neat
It's been a while
Hey there!
It’s been 3 years (yikes) but I am back… maybe? In case you don’t remember, I started this newsletter years ago to chronicle my silly little creations. Thematically, I will still be sharing my silly little creations, but it will be a bit more technologically focused than before, just because that’s where I am right now.
This is a small group of readers so most of you know me, but for anyone who doesn’t, I’m Andrea! I’m based in Vancouver, Canada, and I love to read, cook, eat, doodle, and learn new things. I’ve been working recently as a product manager but I’m currently still on maternity leave after giving birth to my son last year.
I’m going to try SO DANG HARD to get back on this in a consistent way because I have been desperate to get creative in ways that I just haven’t been able to in the past while. I’ve been reading Unicorn Space by Eve Rodsky and using it as a guide on carving out the time I need to be me, despite everything important that requires my time and attention.
As someone who loves technology and makes a living from it, you’d think I’d have jumped on that AI train a long time ago. But truthfully, no! I am a conservative Luddite when it comes to certain types of tech because honestly, I think I know too much about the potential downsides. I was extremely resistant to voice assistants in the early days but my husband unceremoniously and forcefully opted me in when he purchased too many Alexa devices for our home. I was holding my ground not wanting to do too much in ChatGPT for the longest time because quite frankly, it was getting really good at the things I pride myself on being good at, which bothered me (plus a lot of other things too, but I’ll save that for another day to rant about).
So what am I trying to tell you? Well, I’m now getting into ✨ Vibe Coding ✨ - which if you do not know what that is, this is what ChatGPT says after I poked it a few times:
Vibe coding is a creative way to bring tech ideas to life without getting stuck in planning or complex code. You start with a spark of inspiration—like a website or app idea—and use easy tools and AI helpers to experiment, build, and tweak things as you go. It’s more about flow and feel than following strict rules.
Here’s my silly little creation from yesterday - I took the first baby step in vibe coding an iOS app I’ve always wanted to build! Literally, it’s been in my notes and my mind for soooo long, I think I started getting this idea sometime maybe 7 or 8 years ago.
So far the output I’ve gotten is a test app that can actually run on my phone in developer mode. It’s SO COOL! I don’t know a single thing about coding in Swift, using xcode, or compiling a real app, but after a bunch of prompting ChatGPT, some back and forth troubleshooting, a barebones app exists. It took me around under 2 hours to get here.
Having a tangible output (albeit very rudimentary, and of course nowhere near my vision) is so mindblowing. I’m sure that as I get deeper down the rabbit hole it’ll get tougher to put together and I am likely to get stuck in spaghetti code, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
Since then, I played around in v0 to prototype some UI and get some ideas of what I actually want it to look like. Without much input from me, it already drew from a lot of really strong UX gold standards:
I’ve joined a peer group of other AI aficionados where next week we’ll workshop together to learn and build with each other. I’m basically doing some homework right now before we meet.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but I can’t wait to keep poking at these tools and see what comes out. I have never felt so old and so young simultaneously; largely because I understand enough about the foundations of these technologies and how truly mind-boggling the scale is, but also just so green and n00b (“newbie”) at all this.
If you want to chat AI stuff, feel free to email me back! I’d love to hear what you’re noodling on.
Until next time, stay neat potatoes 🥔