She vibe coded a dog cataloguing app in 2 months with no training

Cloc Product Designer Cynthia Chen First Dreamed Up the Idea of ​​An App That Cauld Catalogue Dogs Spotted in the Wild, She SHELVED it.

“The Hurdle was so Big, so i never did anything,” She Said.

For five years, the Dream Sat Untouched. Tok, it’s Live on the App Store.

Dog-e-dex-a playful name inspired by pokédex (not doge)-Lets users snap a picture of a dog, identify the breed use image reconstruction, and add it to a personal Collection. CHEN HAS Two Cats and Hopes to Own a Dog Someday.

She built the app in about two months in her spare time with no formal Engineering training-just pure vibe-coding.

“I have a lot of Experience Building Products with Other Functions, Like With Engineers,” She Said. “But this is my first time actually building something myself.”

Vibe coding, a term coined in February by Openai Cofounder Andrej Karpathy, references to the process of feeding prompts to he to work. As Karpathy Puts it, Developers Can “Fully Give in to the Vibes” and “Forget the Code Eve Exists.”

From Dogs to Code

CHEN STARTED WITH THE App Design In October and Look for a Developer on Fiverr – AN Online Marketplace for Freelancing – But the cost was “intimidating.” Then she realized she is.

She tourned to platforms like replit, chatgpt, and cursor. It wasn’t unyl she discovered anthropic’s claude in Januly that things started to click.

She manually copied the code from CLAUDE INTO XCODE – A tool for Building Apps on Apple Devices – HAPPEN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND WORKED. “It was like magic.”

“Every Time I Pressed The Preview Button, it was an Exciting Little Gift Opening,” She Added.

Building Dog-E-Dex wasn’t smooth sailing.

HER INITIAL PROMPTS CORRECTLY OUTLED THE CORE FUNCTIONALITY, but the app was “Generating Random Dog Breats.”

With a lot of Trial and Error, she figured out how to integrate an image Recognition tool to detect actual breeds.

Along the way, she discovered that she didn’t know what a Backend was – the date and infrastructure that make an application work.

“ENGINEERS WOULD BE LIKE, ‘WHAT”S YOUR DATA SCHEMA? Where are your images stored?’ And i was like, ‘i have no idea, it just work,’ “she said.

Chen Said when she was stuck, she leaned on her Engineering Friends. But she credits much of the work to claude.

If there is one thing thing she’d will differently, she would have started with a thorough Feature list. Without one, she had to redo a lot of the Foundational Setup Along the Way, She Said.

Prompting he is like ‘Gentle Parenting’

CHEN HAS ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO VIBE CODE: Treats Prompting it Like “Gentle Parenting.”

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“You have to be very intentional, very specific, and i think you have to be very nice,” She Said.

One Word Matters: Changing A Prompt From “Can You please build a navigation tab” to “please build a custom navigation tab” Can Lead to Very Different Results. The First Generate a Standard, Built-in Tab Bar Like the Ones in iOS Apps. The Second Creates a Version with Original Style and Behavior.

Sometimes, he needs to be “babied,” she added. When Claude Got Stack, Chen Woul Break Down Instructions Step-By-Step UNIL it Understood.

Design, Said, was “really hard to prompt,” Which gave her confidence that design Jobs Like hers are safe from he disruption.

He Can’t Replace Creativity – That’s ‘Uniquely Human’

Chen Said the Creativity Needed to Solve Problems with He Feels “Uniquely Human.”

While vibe-coding another app, she ran into a hiccup: the he struggled to reign at a small scale. Shen exported the drawing as an image then resusized it into a thumbnail.

“The he didn’t think of that, i thought of that,” she said.

And while he is trying to mimic Personality – with varying results – Its Humans Who Still Think Big Picture.

“A Computer Can’t Just Be Random and Funny, or Think of a Dog App,” She Said.

CHEN THINKS THAT WHAT’S HOLDING PEOPLE BACK ISN’T TECHNICAL KNOW-HOW.

“The Limit is Our Imagination or Our Our Sense of Curiosity, Our Own Sense of Agency. Its No Longer Technical Limits,” She Said.

“JUST TRY THINGS. DON’T WORRY ABOUT IF YOU’LL FAIL OR NOT,” SHE ADDED.

Dog-E-Dex is Still in Its Early Days, with About 75 Downloads from the App Store.

Chen Said She Plass to Begin Marketing It Soon. In the meantime, she finds joy in seeing users share the dogs they collected and heaRing how the app has an BIT OF FUN TO THEIR WALKS.

One user messaged her to say they collected their dog in the app as a way to remember their furry.

“That was really touching,” she Said. “When it impacts someone Day and Makes It Better or Fun or More Delightful in any sort of capacity, that think is the Most Heartwarming.”