I built 30 projects using AI-assisted coding. Follow along as I release one per day, sharing what worked and what didn't.

The Challenge

Starting tomorrow, I'm releasing a project every day for 30 days, all built using AI-assisted coding. Vibe coding, if you will.

Fun fact: the term "vibe coding" was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. The idea is simple: you describe what you want in natural language, and an AI writes the code. You don't really read the code, you just "vibe" with it. You run it, see if it works, and if not, you paste the error back and let the AI fix it. It's a fundamentally different relationship with code than what most developers are used to.

My Take on Vibe Coding (Going In)

I've been building software for 15+ years. When vibe coding started picking up steam, I was curious but skeptical. The demos look incredible: "I built a SaaS in 20 minutes!" But demos always look incredible. I wanted to stress-test this for real. Not one project, not a weekend hack, but 30 of them.

Some questions I had going in:

• How far can you actually get? Can you ship something real, or just a demo that falls apart the moment you try to use it? - What happens to quality? If you're not reading the code, what are you missing? Security holes? Bad architecture? Technical debt from day one? - What does it feel like at scale? One project is fun. What about 30? Does the mental overhead of managing codebases you didn't write become unsustainable? - Is the hype justified? Social media makes it look effortless. Is it?

I'll share my conclusions at the end. For now, I'm going in with an open mind and a lot of caffeine.

The Secret Sauce

Part of this exercise was also about getting to know these tools better. And after spending way too many hours babysitting AI agents, accepting permission prompts, and watching terminals, I ended up building a tool called Watchfire. It lets me queue up work, define what I want, and walk away. Come back later to finished results instead of sitting there approving every file change. It's early, it's rough, and it's very much a work in progress. But it's what made this whole challenge possible alongside a full-time job and being a single parent. More on that at the end of the 30 days.

A Quick Note on Honesty

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