I pay for a lot of small apps. One of them was Wispr Flow for dictation. That’s $14 CAD/month that I was paying until I had a few lazy days visiting my mother. And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Jabber is not “production quality.” I would never sell it as a product or even recommend it to other people, but it does what I needed from Wispr Flow, and it does exactly the way I want it to. For free.
At work, I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works, or sharing some knowledge with new team members, or just a regular demo of something. In the past, I used to use Loom, which costs $15/month. So after crea…
I pay for a lot of small apps. One of them was Wispr Flow for dictation. That’s $14 CAD/month that I was paying until I had a few lazy days visiting my mother. And then on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, I vibecoded Jabber.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Jabber is not “production quality.” I would never sell it as a product or even recommend it to other people, but it does what I needed from Wispr Flow, and it does exactly the way I want it to. For free.
At work, I’m often asked to make small videos showing some support agent how something works, or sharing some knowledge with new team members, or just a regular demo of something. In the past, I used to use Loom, which costs $15/month. So after creating Jabber, I got excited and vibecoded Reel.
Reel does exactly what I wanted Loom to do: I can record my camera, I can move it around, and I get to trim the video after it’s done (I don’t remember being able to do that with Loom).
Then just yesterday, a friend of mine was telling me how he got tired of paying for Typora and decided to vibecode his own Markdown editor. And that gave me the idea of creating an editor for my blog.
That’s Hugora! Yes, horrible name, but who cares? It’s just for me. I get to edit my Hugo blog just the way I like. It even shows my site theme.
You see the pattern here?
All of these $10/month apps are suddenly a weekend project for me. I’m an engineer, but I have never written a single macOS application. I’ve never even read Swift code in my life, and yet, I now can get an app up and running in a couple of hours. This is crazy.
Last year, a Medium post predicted:
Most standalone apps will be “features, not products” in the long run — easy to copy and bundle into larger offerings.
And I think we’re there. I don’t know what that means for the future of our industry, but it does seem like a big shift.
I’m still skeptical of vibecoding in general. As I mentioned above, I would not trust my vibecoding enough to make these into products. If something goes wrong, I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe my LLM friends can, but I don’t know. But vibecoding is 100% viable for personal stuff like this: we now have apps on demand.