Vibe Coding

The Need: you cannot judge an AI job without a price tag When I start a new AI job, I always ask the same question first: what will this cost? A job can look cheap on paper and then run for hours. Or it can look scary and cost a few cents. This week I used one DeepSeek balance for four different jobs on my family book library. I wrote down the balance after each one. This post is that list, plus what I would do differently. ...

I have two PCs and I use Claude Code on both. I wanted the second one to keep the same prompt diary as the first. I could have copied files by hand. Instead I asked Claude Code to write down, in one file, what the other PC’s Claude Code should do. Then I gave that file to it. This post explains the hook and the request file. The hook is now running on the other PC, and the last section lists what I still have not checked. ...

The Need: Other People Wanted It Too A few days after I put the church directory into my own Bible app, people at church heard about it. They asked if everyone could use it. A photo directory is only useful if the other members have it too, and a printed booklet gets lost. But the directory has photos, names and home addresses of about 140 families. I could not just put it on the internet. And I did not want to make 140 accounts or remember who forgot a password. ...

I had just added six commentary volumes to my Bible search. I asked it a question about the fruit in the garden of Eden. The answer came back with sermons and Bible verses. Not one of the six new books was among the sources. The books were in the database. The search just did not pick them. The Need: A Source You Added Must Be Able to Appear If a new source never shows up, you cannot tell whether it is broken or simply ranked low. You only see the answer, and the answer looks fine. It is easy to think “the system works” and move on. ...

The Need: it works, but it looks like a prototype I am a 60-year-old non-programmer. Claude Code can build what I describe, but I cannot describe what a good e-book reader looks like. I know it when I see it on a store-bought reader app. I do not know the words: line breaks, tap zones, running heads, safe areas. My viewer worked. It also looked rough. The text broke in the middle of Korean words, the cover needed scrolling, and there was no page-turn mode. ...

The Need: a book you can read on a phone I had translated six old commentary volumes into Korean with an API. The first thing I made from one of them was a print-style PDF, and then a page-image viewer: 301 JPG files, 48 MB, one image per page. It looked fine on a tablet. On a phone held upright, the letters were tiny. Pinch-zooming a page image is not reading. ...

The Need: a book you want to search, but it is only paper I have a 19th-century commentary on the five books of Moses. It has six volumes. I wanted all of it inside my own search tool, so I could ask a question in Korean and get the commentary back as one of the sources. The usual way is to scan the pages and turn them into text. That worked badly for me, and the way it worked badly led to the cheaper answer. ...

I have a lot of Bible material that I cannot search together. Sermon recordings turned into text. A commentary that I scanned page by page. A few Bible translations. Each one has its own search, or no search at all. When I wonder “what did the Bible and the preachers say about this?”, I open four things and read. So I built one box where I type a question, and it answers using all of them, with a number after every claim that points to the exact source. ...

I built the Mother Goose tab on 13 October 2026. This happened on 21 October, eight days later. The Need: One Book Without a Song The tab holds 19 songs, one for each board book in a set we were given. Each book has a cover, a video, an audio-only mode, synced lyrics, and a photo of the book’s translation page. The physical set has 20 books. My daughter is three. She can’t read the titles. But she told her mother that the Muffin Man book was in the pile and had no song in the tab. Her mother was surprised. Out of 20 books, how did she know which one was missing? ...

The Need: A Paper Directory Does Not Remember Anything Every year my church prints a small booklet with a photo of each family. Under each photo there are the names, a short address, and a mark next to each name: br for brother or si for sister. In my church the mark is not about being male or female. It means the person has been saved and baptized. A husband who has not been baptized has no mark, even when his wife has si next to her name, and in church we call that family by the wife’s name. ...