Via How I AI

“When all of the new appgen tools came out (I think Lovable is like one year old now), I was like, “Hey, I’m going to try this out.” And it felt magical, right? And I’d kind of played around with some of the earlier versions of GPT, but when vibe-coding started coming on the scene, I actually built an app to capture my kids’ memories and that was the first vibe-coded app that I built and I built it in a weekend. It just felt like something completely different than anything I had ever built before.

And here we are a year later and I’m sitting in Claude code all day and you know this is an app that I’m continually maintaining. You can see I’m running it on local host and I probably have built dozens of apps this year. […]

So a lot of times when you’re building AI native products you also have to be just in the weeds a lot and making mistakes. And […] this product is not perfect. This is a product for one person right now. That’s really how I got started. And it’s something that now is just part of my day-to-day. This is my daily driver.

— How Webflow’s CPO built an AI chief of staff to manage her calendar and drive internal AI adoption, at 3:55

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Rachel Wolan’s (Chief Product Officer at Webflow) journey back to coding started with building a memory app for her kids over a weekend using vibe coding tools.

1. This personal project became her gateway to understanding what AI could do. “When all of the new app gen tools came out, I was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to try this out.’ And it felt magical, right?” she explained.

The key advantages of starting with personal projects:

• Low stakes experimentation – Building for yourself means you can make mistakes without consequences
• Immediate value – You’re solving real problems you face daily
• Authentic understanding – Hands-on experience that can’t be replaced by demos or presentations
• Credibility with teams – “It would be inauthentic for me to tell them, hey, you need to prototype with AI if this isn’t something that I’m doing every single day”

This approach transforms executives from AI theorists into AI practitioners, giving them genuine insight into both the capabilities and limitations of these tools that they can then apply to their teams.

2. Personal software can be ephemeral, customized, and rebuilt as needs change.

Unlike enterprise software that must serve many users, Rachel’s approach treats personal software as disposable and hyper-customized. “You may never look at this Q4 roadmap after Q4 again and you may want to do it completely differently the next time,” host Claire Vo observed about Rachel’s rotating set of agents.

Benefits of the ephemeral approach:

• Build exactly what you need right now without over-engineering for future use cases
• Design interfaces that match your personal preferences (Rachel almost redesigned hers to look like Apple Notes)
• Toss away widgets when they’re no longer useful
• Iterate quickly without worrying about backwards compatibility or other users

This mindset shift treats software development more like creating documents than building products – with vibe coding tools, the effort required is comparable, making it practical to build and discard tools as needs evolve.