The Challenge#
Starting tomorrow, I’m releasing a project every day for 30 days, all built using AI-assisted coding. Vibe coding, if you will.
Fun fact: the term “vibe coding” was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. The idea is simple: you describe what you want in natural language, and an AI writes the code. You don’t really read the code, you just “vibe” with it. You run it, see if it works, and if not, you paste the error back and let the AI fix it. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with code than what most developers are used to.
My Take on Vibe Coding (Going In)#
I’ve been building software for 15+ years. When vibe coding started picking up steam, I was curious but skeptical. The demos look incredible: “I built a SaaS in 20 minutes!” But demos always look incredible. I wanted to stress-test this for real. Not one project, not a weekend hack, but 30 of them.
Some questions I had going in:
- How far can you actually get? Can you ship something real, or just a demo that falls apart the moment you try to use it?
- What happens to quality? If you’re not reading the code, what are you missing? Security holes? Bad architecture? Technical debt from day one?
- What does it feel like at scale? One project is fun. What about 30? Does the mental overhead of managing codebases you didn’t write become unsustainable?
- Is the hype justified? Social media makes it look effortless. Is it?
I’ll share my conclusions at the end. For now, I’m going in with an open mind and a lot of caffeine.
The Secret Sauce#
Part of this exercise was also about getting to know these tools better. And after spending way too many hours babysitting AI agents, accepting permission prompts, and watching terminals, I ended up building a tool called Watchfire. It lets me queue up work, define what I want, and walk away. Come back later to finished results instead of sitting there approving every file change. It’s early, it’s rough, and it’s very much a work in progress. But it’s what made this whole challenge possible alongside a full-time job and being a single parent. More on that at the end of the 30 days.
A Quick Note on Honesty#
I want to be upfront: I didn’t build these one-per-day in real-time. I’m a single dad with a full-time job. Some days I had the energy to knock out two or three projects. Other days, life happened and I built nothing. The work happened over roughly 30 days of calendar time, but not in a neat one-per-day cadence.
The “Day X” framing is how I’m releasing them: one per day, for 30 consecutive days. Each blog post documents what actually happened during the build, not a fiction of daily perfection. I don’t want anyone to feel bad comparing their pace to something that wasn’t real.
What is real: every project was built from scratch with AI assistance, every one is deployed and functional, and the total effort was roughly 30 projects over 30 days.
Why?#
- Forming my own opinion: I believe AI is here to stay. There’s real value, there are real risks, and there’s a lot of hype. The only way for me to form an opinion I actually trust is by spending serious time with these tools. Not a weekend, not a tutorial. 30 projects.
- Learning: Push myself to explore new technologies and ideas
- Documenting: Share the journey, the wins and the failures
- Shipping: Actually finish things and put them out in the world
A note on cost: Anthropic is sponsoring a Max 20x plan for me because of my work on Blowfish, an open-source Hugo theme. That means I can burn through tokens on this challenge without worrying about the bill. I’m fortunate to have that, and I want to be transparent about it because “just vibe code 30 projects” is a very different proposition when you’re paying per token out of pocket.
What to Expect#
Everything will be rough. Some projects are tiny. Some are more ambitious. That’s the point.
Follow Along#
- Newsletter: Subscribe below to get an email every time a new project drops
- Social: Follow me on LinkedIn, X, Threads, and Bluesky for daily updates. #30DaysOfVibeCoding
- GitHub: All projects will be linked from the index repo
Let’s see what happens. Day 1 starts tomorrow.
This is post 0 of the 30 Days of Vibe Coding series.
