Two Months of Vibe Coding a House

Two Months of Vibe Coding a House

For two months I built software mostly by describing problems to an AI in plain sentences. Out of that came a box inventory with QR labels, an offline-episode queue that replaces a feature Plex removed, an audiobook catalogue, an off-box “break glass” map of my network, a photo pipeline for a Leica, a slideshow maker, and a 3D-printed lens case that took ten tries. Then one ordinary reboot left half of it running blind for fifteen hours without a single alert. That night taught me more than the building did. This post covers the apps, the reasons I couldn’t just buy them, what broke, and the safety nets I built afterwards.

I Attended the AFCEA San Diego Mission Systems Symposium. I Learned What Vibe Coding Was.

I Attended the AFCEA San Diego Mission Systems Symposium. I Learned What Vibe Coding Was.

At the AFCEA San Diego Mission Systems Symposium, Gene Kim described how sailors had built eleven mission-critical applications themselves and were using them — work that once took “millions of dollars and two years” and now takes “tens of dollars in tokens and a couple of hours.” He was describing what I’d been doing in my homelab all year, and finally gave me the word for it: vibe coding. So after the session I showed a colleague, by building one. Twenty-three minutes later there was a live website with its own address, a real certificate, a public hostname, documentation and a change ledger. Without the AI harness behind it, that’s a month of evenings.