Liberty Workbench is an occasional series where I put one idea on the bench and think it through with you.
Vibe coding /ˈvaɪb ˌkoʊdɪŋ/ noun (informal)
A method of software development in which a person uses artificial intelligence to generate and modify code through natural-language instructions, accepting its output with little or no review or understanding of the underlying code.
Coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025.
Many of you have been asking for updates about my vibe-coded apps, which I’ve teased in past editions. I thought it would be quick, and I could tell you about it sooner. But it’s one of these things where you start something small, and then you think of something else and something else, and before you know it, you’re trying to build the Taj Mahal 😅 (and failing, but learning)
First, it’s not one app. It’s six!
But I’ll focus on four of them here.
Where it all started 🪴🖼️🏠
I’ve always been very interested in software engineering, but I’ve never been a coder myself. For a long time it felt like a road not taken, and I had some regret… but in recent months, it became possible to apply the high-level principles I had learned by osmosis just from being a nerd and following tech for decades and direct coding agents to implement things.
I used both Codex and Claude Code (I went back and forth between the two, they tend to catch each other’s mistakes and have their own strengths and weaknesses).
The biggest step, as it always is, was to go from zero to one.
My wife and I were talking about how it would be fun to print some of our favorite photos we’ve taken over the years and frame them to fill some bare walls in a part of our house (either family portraits or nature shots).
This got me thinking about how hard it is to pick favorites from hundreds and hundreds of photos… and I had the idea for my first app.
At first it was supposed to be very simple. Just dump all your photos into it. It shows you a pair and you pick your favorite of the two. A/B selection. The app keeps track and after a while, it can rank your photos and find your favorites.
Pairwise: The devil’s in the detail 😈
Ok. Simple enough, right?
