Vibe Coding

My wife listens to a Bible teacher every morning. After I built her an app to make that easier (the first post in this series), she asked for one more thing. It turned out to be the hardest part of the project. Could we also read his teachings, she said, not just hear them? Reading helps her study. She wanted the words on a screen. “Sure,” I thought. “I’ll just turn the audio into text.” How hard could it be? In 2026, turning speech into text is mostly a solved problem. ...

My three-year-old daughter has a favorite show. Baby Shark. She could watch it every day, and often does. Last week, I showed her something new. Fifteen short videos of herself as a baby — the first year of her life, played one after another. She sat still for one hour. Smiling, then laughing out loud, then quiet and focused. She didn’t ask for Baby Shark once. My wife was watching from across the room. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. ...

There is a 1974 German theology book that exists in almost no library. One copy lives with its owner here in Korea. He wanted it translated into Korean. I offered to help. First step: get it scanned properly. I visited a professional scanning company. They said the book needed to be taken apart — pages separated, binding cut — before they could run it through their equipment. I relayed this to the owner. He said: do not cut this book. The scanning company said: then we cannot help you. ...

Here’s a question that sounds odd at first. Could the cheapest, smallest, quietest computer in your house be your home server? Not a Raspberry Pi. Not a NAS. Not an old laptop on a shelf, fan going, getting warm. I mean an ordinary Android tablet — the kind you’d hand a three-year-old to watch cartoons. It turns out it can, and I’ve been running one this way for a while. A $100 tablet sits in my home right now, plugged into the wall. It runs a real Linux server that serves audio to a web app, over its own secure web address. It’s silent, about the size of a paperback, and it uses very little power. I’m as comfortable leaving it on as I am leaving my phone on. ...

You’ve probably felt this. Someone mentions a technology — Cloudflare Tunnel, RAG, Termux, vector search — and a small door closes in your head. “That sounds powerful,” you think, “but it’s not for me. I’m not an engineer.” For most of my life, that feeling was right. Knowing the name of a technology got you almost nowhere. Between the name and a working result there were months of study, and a level of skill I was never going to reach. ...

My wife has a habit I love. Every morning, before the day starts, she listens to a Bible teacher she has followed for years. It’s not the Sunday message from our church. It’s something quieter and more personal — a set of recordings she comes back to again and again. They calm her. There was one problem. To listen, she had to open the file manager on her phone, scroll through a long list of audio files with odd names, and tap the right one from memory. No order. No search. No “play the next one.” If she wanted a certain teaching, she usually couldn’t find it. ...

Every parent knows this feeling. You hand your child a tablet to show them one video you picked. One tap later, the app has carried them off somewhere else — loud videos, ads, and “recommended” clips chosen by an algorithm that doesn’t know or care about your child. I didn’t want that for my daughter. I also didn’t want to pay a monthly fee, make another account, or hand my child’s attention to another company. ...