2026-01-03
Vibecoding Projects
Below are some of the projects I've built using Claude Code. These have the prompt counts at the point where I was okay using the tools. Some of these prompt counts are much higher after being used as I wanted to add features or change how things worked.
I start the project with a CLAUDE.md file and then prompt using Claude Code. I tried to keep track of my prompts but there are also many I missed and I'm not including any back and forth or what may have required debugging and prodding.
However I do think the prompt counts may be useful to see.
Manga Reader
The first project I did was an application to manage and read my manga. The usual manga sites that available are all filled with ads and it's painful to use. I usually download my manga already and I could use a manga reader but vibecoding one I figured would be simple.
And indeed it was, it went relatively smoothly and I was quickly reading Knights of Sidonia. In other news, it was alright but not as good as Blame! by far. I liked Biomega way more as well.
Video Streamer - 140 Prompts
The next project was a plex substitute and this went fantastically. I was able to quickly get posters and covers after getting tmdb api key. Claude also got the transcoding working quickly and it handled multiple audio and subtitle tracks perfectly after prodding.
I did put in quite a bit of work to get the functionality I wanted and I have some handy things like being able to view how much data is being used and where everything is being stored.
I was quite impressed by Claude in this case.
Book Reader
This project is what brought me back to earth for my expectations. I figured a book reader would be far simpler for Claude to do, especially since the books are either PDFs or epubs. Claude definitely didn't seem to fully get everything working properly.
The video site was almost a one shot in how good it got the first version, the time I spent was adding on features I had always wanted in Netflix and Plex.
The book reader was unusable initially and it wasn't until I kept prodding it into the right direction that I could read something. I still don't think the project is that good and overall it's not very useful.
The movies and tv show names have weird formats but Claude was able to write regexes to parse everything out even for edge cases that I had to show it. However for books, it was unable to do that and it didn't do much in the way of cleaning any of the names up.
My theory is that video streaming sites are so common and the databases for them so extensive that Claude had a much easier time generating the code. Books are far smaller and not much code for it probably exists so there isn't enough to steal from.
Kanban - 62 prompts
This was an easy one for claude. I had originally let it free style this but I quickly realize I wanted structure. I had Claude set up just 3 sections, TODO, IN PROGRESS and DONE. I had Claude add in extra features but overall this is probably the simplest app but also the most helpful.
I use this to queue up work for Claude and I can then keep track of where and what Claude is working on. As things are finished, i test and move things into different buckets. I see people have created workflows where claude does the movement of cards but I think that is silly.
Forcing myself to read and pay attention to kanban board is how I stay involved and it definitely feels better than what I was doing before which was playing on my phone while waiting and then when claude was ready, i would give the next task.I think there is an interesting idea here about creating and IDE that is a kanban board.
Screen Share - 58 prompts
I wanted an app that will let me share a window or a region of the screen to a preview window. This preview window can then be put somewhere like a second monitor. There are some third party tools for this but they seem complex and are a pain to use.
This was my first Windows application and this time I had Claude use Go and Wails and to my surprise it basically got it done in the first try. I had it stream the selected window to the browser where it would serve it over http. This way I could stream a selected window to the preview pane or someone can visit the URL and see the my screen.
This was a fantastic experience and I'm quite happy with how this turned out.
Wired - 305 prompts
I use mobaterm for my main terminal needs and putty works great in a pinch. However I want a terminal environment similar to a browser. I'm planning to have an address bar, suggestions, bookmarks, and history information. I think this is going to help in making my life a bit easier.
Go and Wails seems to be a good fit, especially seeing how well the screen share project went.
There is definitely a pleasure in designing my dream terminal environment. The coding part is something I'm missing. But to be fair, the coding part is also probably the most boring as the interesting part is the emulator and that is done for me as I would have used xtermjs.
Claude is basically setting up the layout I want.
It took about 300 prompts to get my environment the way I wanted and actually using it. I will need to spend some time playing with it but I do like this style. My terminal environment is now very similar to a browser where there are tabs, saved connections and credentials, the ability to download and upload files. The reason this blew up in prompt counts is that its really two applications in one.
On one side the application is for ssh connection but it is also a fully functional sftp client. I have the option use an existing connection to start an sftp connection and then I get a nice file viewer that I can see files, preview them, download them and upload things.
I also can start other applications from my address bar which is handy.
This is probably the most impressive thing Claude has built so far and hopefully the most useful.
grdp Testing
This was a test project to use Go and talk to an rdp server. The goal was to embed a rdp client inside my wired application. I knew this was a bit of an ask so I tried a test application first.
This didn't go well. This was prompting but I could tell Claude was not having a good time with it. At least I wasn't.
Snip and Draw - 7 prompts
This was a tool to replace the Windows snipping tool. I wanted Claude to use Go and Wails to do this.
It got a basic version working but I quickly ran into performance issues and slowness. The goal was to replace the already slow windows tool and I found that using Go and Wails was a bad fit. Even the speed ups Claude came up with involved skipping the webview and so my entire approach was incorrect.
Snip and Draw V2 - 26 prompts
I restarted Claude and this time let it choose the tech for a fast and performant snipping tool. It chose rust and it seems to be much better now. The code generation was much more smooth and require less prodding. I could quickly tell this was the right approach.
I also now have a very fast and easy to use snipping tool specifically for my workflow. I think this kind of thing is what AI is really going to enable. The ability to write one off programs that scratch your specific itch.
Wired-rs - 61 prompts
I tried a rewrite in rust of my terminal manager. The goal was to get RDP working inside the application and so rust had Iron RDP which would work for me. I had rust use egui for the GUI stuff.
The biggest issue was my lack of knowledge of using egui and rust.
The other fairly large issue was that rust killed all iteration speed, the compilation time went up so much that there was never an actual flow state like there was when I was working on the go version. The go version I had a much better time running, testing and then describing the issue.
That iteration time I think is huge as the AI is already a bit slow.
I'm also going to stick with Wails as having the inspector tool and understanding html, css, and javascript lets me be more involved in the debugging process.
Night Board - 62 prompts
I had Claude write the very basics of a task management system. I wrote out a spec and then had Claude iterate on this to flesh things out. Once it was fleshed out I then had it coded up.
This was a bit of a new flow as usually I keep things relatively light and let the AI drive.
I wasn't a fan of this and I ultimately decided against using the code. I felt like there was too many things that were built too quickly and testing was becoming an issue. It also didn't help that getting one part of the site working the way I wanted didn't have changes propagating out. It means that Claude had built each section individually.I also decided that it made more sense to build the task system as part of my kanban board. I already like the styling and UI there and it makes sense to have my productivity stuff in one place so I only need to keep one tab open.
This was a good first attempt I think and it cleared things up for me.
I much prefer targeting one feature and then building on top of that for awhile before adding the next feature. Giving a spec of features makes me overwhelmed with things to check.
I did expand the kanban board drastically now and it does seem vaguely useful. Unfortunately I fell into the trap of having one tool for both work and personal and that made things feel wonky. Things dont fit quite right. I should have made them two apps.
I'm probably going to reset and do that going forward.
Whiteboard - 101 prompts
I made a whiteboarding app using tldraw. This was a bit cumbersome as there wasn't enough information for claude and I had to find and give it documentation. I made a very large error and wasted both time and tokens going down the wrong path. It would have been immediately obvious had I done even a cursory glance at the docs.
I didn't realize that the licensing was required when running things on a domain, internally I was fine but had weird issues going live and spent hours trying to debug it. I did come up with a way for Claude to debug and send messages to itself in a loop so that it was able to investigate and find the core issue over time.
However a simple look at the console of the dev verion would have told us the same thing.
The other thing was that Claude kept trying to build things itself, likely because I asked it to and it didn't know that there was better ways. I read the documentation for tldraw and found the sync and collobaration features and this really cuts down the bugs and code size that Claude had implemented when trying to do multiplayer.
This project was a good learning experience as I did come away with a better debugging method for AI and learned that I should read the documentation at the very least even if I'm not going to look at the code.
Gym - 55 prompts
Had claude write a very simple workout tracker. I can create exercises, routines and log them. This is a trivial application and Claude got the core of it working almost immediately. The bulk of the prompts was me making design changes and changing what displayed on the screen. The best part is this works exactly how I want it to and works on both desktop and mobile beautifully.
Notes - 182 prompts
Had Claude write a note taking app based very much on the kanban tool I have. Not sure if it's that good but I like using it.
The notes application evolved from something that was just notes to kanban lite, to forums and now to something like zettlekasten. I think there is a much better design hiding in this application.
Reverse Engineering UniRPC V3 in Go - Ralph Loop
My first attemp at using the ralph loop was with a reverse engineering project that I've been trying to get done.
It worked beautifully where I set up a virtual machine where claude had root access and I installed everything it neede to reverse engineer the protocol. It could run tests, use tcpdump and from there create a byte for byte port.
I'm not sure how many prompts but it did take about 15 iterations of the loop where it planned and took a step from the task list.
Reverse Engineering UniRPC V3 in Javascript - Ralph Loop
Similar to the go port, this was done for javascript. This took about 22 iterations of the loop to do.
A bit unusual, I wonder what happened. However I don't have visibility into what goes in the ralph loop but I think that's my own fault.
I'll need to figure out how to make it better and how other people do it.
PDF Editor - 184 prompts
A web based PDF Editor tool
Reverse Engineering DD - Ralph Loop
Worked on a project where I wanted to decompile a windows application that runs as server and make it into a CLI tool. I used a ralph loop successfully here.
Testing Harness for terminal application - 16 prompts and ralph loop
This was 16 large prompts of investigating and fixing and writing test routines with claude to get the proper environment set up so I can do automated testing.
Video Analysis
Similar to what Andrej Karpath did, I set up a pipeline where my security cameras feed into an AI that does analysis on the frames.
This came together easily but local models, at least the ones I can run, are not good enough for this.
ERP Design
Had Claude look at various ERP websites and come up with a design document. Used this for a simple stock project website. This work quite well and the design I believe came out nicely.