- Babe
- Posts
- I'm building an app and so is everyone else
I'm building an app and so is everyone else
vibe coding isn't the same as AI-assisted engineering and neither are you, plus links to photographer Ashley Sophia Clark and Addy Osmani
Laura Winberry
September 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
gm and welcome to issue 34—thanks for being here. 🏴☠️
So… I’m working on an app.
I understand that this statement is more or less cliché at this juncture in modern time. What with all the vibe coding apps out there, and the current discourse around said vibe coding.
Nevertheless, I’m a writer and brand builder and marketer who doesn’t operate in code languages—and I’m building an app.
For the first 15 hours of building, I’ve asked Chat questions and then built things manually inside a platform called Glide. How did I land on Glide? I told Chat what I wanted to build and then asked what the best no-code app builder would be for such a project. So as to try and avoid misguidance, I also asked Gemini and Claude the exact same thing. All three chose Glide. Whether or not it actually is the best tool for the job is yet tbd.
No, this week’s newsletter isn’t an ad for Glide. It is, however, a rambling missive about:
Learning what a boolean loop is (and creating one for the first time)
How to set up logic so that is translates from bts data sets into frontend, user-interface delight
Creating said data sets
And so on in data- and logic-filled ways I don’t normally operate
The experience felt somewhat like how this photograph by Ashley Sophia Clark makes me feel—this is fucking cool and I don’t fully understand it and that doesn’t matter.
After roughly 15-20 hours of doing this, I realized there was a no-code AI assistant to which you could feed prompts and then watch the magic unfold in the form of an app element. This was the vibe coding the internet has been chattering about. I know the code it generates is most likely sloppy, subpar, and less than nuanced—but for someone who just needs a starting point, it’s really fucking cool.
I went from spending an hour and a half building the logic behind a heart button that, when “liked” toggled from unfilled to filled and vice versa—to generating a state-specific map with curated search functionality endemic to the content listed in my app in less than 10 minutes.
Sounds like the kind of social proof shit B2B SaaS platforms sprinkle throughout their sales landing pages, I know. But it’s true! The time savings are proving to be tremendous, and the barrier to entry greatly lowered.
Still, I know I’ll both need and want real engineers on this bitch at some point. But when you’re just testing and playing with things and formulating an MVP, this vibe coding shit is sick.
K, if you missed last week’s issue, you can find it right here. Otherwise, onward to today’s curation of links your algo won’t feed you. lfg.
***quick note from today’s sponsor (these ads are cheesy, I know—but I fully vet the newsletters and damn a girl gotta get paid)***
Swap, Bridge, and Track Tokens Across 14+ Chains
Uniswap web app lets you swap thousands of tokens safely, in seconds. Open‑source, audited code and real‑time token warnings help keep you safe.
***back to my shit***
🌱 On-Ramp → easy entry, no gas fees required
Given that the general theme of today’s newsletter (not that there needs to be or ever truly is a theme) hovers around vibe coding and building shit and the importance of engineers, I’m starting out with this read from Addy Osmani.
Osmani leads Chrome’s Developer Experience at Google—so when he draws lines between “vibes” and engineering, I’m listening.
“Vibe coding is great for momentum, but without structure it collapses under production demands.”
In his Substack article—”Vibe coding is not the same as AI-assisted engineering”—Osmani writes that "‘vibe coding’ is about fully giving in to the creative flow with an AI (high-level prompting), essentially forgetting the code exists. It involves accepting AI suggestions without deep review and focusing on rapid, iterative experimentation, making it ideal for prototypes, MVPs, learning, and what Karpathy calls ‘throwaway weekend projects.’"
He then goes on to outline what AI-assisted engineering is, and how both of these things hold value but are not to be conflated. Basically saying that vibes are a sandbox. Shipping needs seatbelts: spec, tests, review, security. Keep the human in the loop. Which I love, and give an enthusiastic fuck yes to.
It’s a great, informative, generous read. Whether you’re an engineer, dabbling in vibe coding, or neither—I highly recommend.
✨ Middle Layer → where things get interesting
While this next link doesn’t belong in the “middle layer” section of this newsletter, I wanted to include it so I’m including it here.
It ties into the whole “I’m building an app” thing because it looks at the tangential statement of “I’m a founder.” Whether either of these statements are wholly true is beside the point. What I’m getting at here is that they often come hand in hand and, in my case, they do. Are they are about to, maybe, kinda sorta, we’ll see.
Who knows, maybe Babe ends up being a weekly missive about building (onchain and off), founding, and raising capital for that shit.
A dear friend sent me the article this morning—“Is Your Startup Idea Any Good?"—and I read it immediately and then started thinking about what other founders I could contact. What questions I could ask. And who could poke the right holes in my idea. Because let’s face it, there are always holes and I’d rather know as many of them as possible now as opposed to later.
“When you first explore an idea, you feel really stupid… Doable but hard is like, ‘I’m in.’”
And honestly, the timing also feels right here. The first thing that came into my mind upon waking up this morning was: I need others to help me see where I could hit roadblocks with this thing, asap.
And then the dear friend texted me this link and I’ve been off running with it in my head (while also tapping out Babe for you).
classic
That’s it for issue 34. Thanks for hanging out—send me your non-sketchy links, and I’ll see you here next week, nerds.
xoxo,
lw
PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the last issue? It’s right here. Also literally none of this is ever financial advice. I’m sharing what I learn through Babe, and perhaps you’ll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, maybe, who knows, ily. Also if you’re not already, come hang with Babe on insta, Farcaster, and TBA 🟦.
Next week in Babe: More links ily!