When Ethan Mollick wrote about vibecoding, I knew I had to test it myself. The first project I had in mind was to make a Tetris embedded in my website, which visitors can play. When I couldn’t refine the game such that it would (1) have a leaderboard and (2) allow the user to speed up the game, I felt limited by not knowing enough words or coding jargon to bring the idea to life.
Like anyone with so little patience, I moved on and asked Claude to create a program with a graphical user interface that would allow me to draw pixel art. And it did!
After some tweaks to add more features (like undo and redo because I was frustrated to keep erasing the recent move I did), I finally had something like this:
I asked Claude to add a feature that would allow me to export the pixel art into PNG and here’s an example of my attempt to draw a house plant:
When I attempted to draw something, I found it challenging to squeeze my brain with something visual—unlike my seven-year-old niece, who seemed to have unlimited imagination. So, after seeing comic strips in the blogs I’ve been reading, I thought, how about a comic strip?
What started as fun as I wrote English prompts became dissatisfaction mainly because I could not translate my ideas into words. I was running out of words!
I can’t help but agree with Seth Godin when he wrote:
Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It’s tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there’s a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment.
Does vocabulary matter?
Like all projects coming to life in an iterative process, I kept asking Claude to redo parts of the characters, add features to the comic strip creator, and fix errors when the code didn’t run on Python. I eventually maxed out my credit limit for the day and tried to keep myself from sulking about unfinished business. It would all be better tomorrow.
The next day (at least 24 hours after my daily limit had been restored), I was so excited to ask Claude to rerun the 1,569 lines of code (which I never wrote even a single line, but Claude did from scratch) and add the final edit I wanted—Novo cat having a pink nose and pointy ears—the final program looked like this:
The comic strip creator can have a single or four-panel strip, with editable texts on top of the characters (me on pixels and our cat Novo) and five expressions (happy, sad, surprised, thinking, and angry).
Now that I am satisfied with the output, I’ll add comic strips to my future blog posts because, aside from the thoughts in my head conversing loudly even as I write this line (like any normal person typically experience on a daily basis 👀 right? right?), I find writing in thought bubbles fun and visually entertaining.
AI tools really feel empowering for ordinary people like me.
jessa 