You need to vibe code to experience a magic moment first hand

This week, Mark Zuckerberg said that a single talented individual can now execute the work of a full product team. You can hear that and nod, or you can feel the gravity of it by trying it yourself.

I built and shipped a full-stack app this weekend entirely during walks with our napping newborn strapped to my chest. I want to share the product, the stack, and thoughts on how AI will continue changing how we work.

My problem: I love cooking, but my current reality is chaos: 30 minutes to cook, a toddler to please, and nutrition needs to fulfill. ChatGPT helps, but typing with flour-covered fingers on a tiny screen is a nightmare.

Enter Riff. An AI sous chef that turns your fridge into dinner.

It learns your tastes, remembers your pantry, and is designed for glanceability while chopping onions. I built it for learning first, and as a utility for myself second. Try it yourself at http://riffcooking.com.

I used a stroller-walk friendly stack. I started with Gemini for planning and meta-prompting, including to triage me to other tools. Replit’s Agent did the heavy lifting (via their great mobile app!), and offered plug-and-play integrations for “complex” functionality, including the database, account creation, and API integrations. For the brain, I used OpenAI…it’s the secret sauce behind the recipe creation and (admittedly gimmicky) features like fridge vision to scan your ingredients.

I vibecoded from sticky note to MVP in a few hours, with a bill running about ~$150. (Sidenote: The best feedback I got came backhanded. When I posted about this on Threads, someone chimed in to call BS, claiming it couldn’t have been possible to build something with this degree of sophistication without more time and money. He was wrong. This is really that easy, and I take the skepticism as validation!)

To be clear, the app is buggy. It’s imperfect. And yes, it’s just a GPT wrapper. But it works.

If you work in product, consider trying this. Understanding viscerally how fast you can move from “idea” to “shipped” is a feeling you can't get from reading articles.

Already, prototypes have replaced decks as the language of product development. When you can build in hours (minutes), you can see why.

We are entering an era where generalists can go incredibly deep, and specialists can go incredibly broad. Increasingly, the expectation will be that anyone in product development can operate end to end. If you’ve been waiting to mix into this new workflow, consider this your nudge. 

When you’re stuck thinking about what to make for dinner tonight, fire up Riff and let me know if it helps you make something good. And if you’ve been on the fence about building something yourself…just start.f