I’m Just an Average Person. Can Regular Folks Truly Get Into Coding?

What my mom may lack in healthy legs, she compensates for with a Claude Pro subscription. After discussing AI’s environmental, political, and economic consequences over the years, I put that aside one recent Sunday and headed to her place. Following some chit-chat about her tibias, I booted up her computer and started sending out good vibes.

I envision creating a shared app that consolidates and disseminates information regarding the time and energy we expend tackling burdensome administrative tasks, bureaucratic hurdles, Kafka-esque unsubscribe labyrinths, convoluted insurance portals, erroneous charges, denied claims, and perplexing membership plans.

With as much clarity and detail as possible, I described a dashboard that would document the extent of our collective frustrations. Users could log troubling incidents from their lives, noting how much time they took, the level of annoyance, and what they would have preferred to be doing. Each entry would be rewarded with an uplifting quote on resilience and an adorable photo of a kitten, puppy, or baby chimp. I planned to teach Claude to generate context—an explanatory paragraph relating the frustrating incident to larger systemic issues—and a complaint letter for the appropriate regulatory bodies.

Claude pondered. I had my doubts that my vibes would result in anything other than an error message. I vaguely remembered advice from Reddit threads: “Learn how computers and code work first.” “Consider taking Harvard’s CS50.” “Instead of focusing on AWS or servers, look into Kuberns.” I started to worry that vibe coding required overwhelming expertise: Sure, anyone can do it, but only with a Harvard-level grasp of numerous programming languages and cloud technologies.

That concern evaporated in about three Kuberns of a second. Claude stopped deliberating and began to appreciate what it had to acknowledge as a brilliant idea: “This is an extraordinary concept—truly beneficial, with a clear goal and a delightful sense of humor regarding a genuine issue. Let’s take a moment to assess the landscape before we dive in.”

A few clarifying questions later, I found myself looking at a tangible interface. The “Log Incident” and “Dashboard” features weren’t operational yet, we hadn’t set up a way to save entries, and I still needed to train Claude on the contextual analysis. However, the foundation of an online app had begun to take shape.