I vibecoded my first (super simple) app

AI has brought back the fun of creating

I was very lucky that my dad got the family a PC when I was a kid. He installed it in the living room and encouraged me to play with it. Having a PC in Cairo in the mid-80s was a special treat. I got hooked pretty early. Loved playing games and writing very basic code.

In high school, I continued being passionate about anything tech. This interest allowed me to connect with other nerds. We built machines, played games, pirated music and hung out in online communities. By the end of high school, the web was taking off and that obviously was a lot of fun for us. My best friend and I started making websites and built a thriving business around it. Our clients were dentists, lawyers, etc. We paid for our first cars with this money.

When it was time to choose a university program, I enrolled in computer science, expecting to spend most of my time building websites and software. Instead, it was all theoretical. Tons of pure math, low-level OS classes, pumping lemmas. I’m sure there was a method to the madness, but I couldn’t connect any of it to what I actually enjoyed doing. Upon graduation, I switched to the dark side. I became a “business guy.” I even got an MBA to add insult to injury.

I never really touched code in the last 20+ years since graduating. I tried a couple of times to get back into it but the landscape has changed so much and things gotten so complicated that I didn’t have the inclination to re-learn it.

Then vibe coding tools showed up and something clicked. For the first time, I could describe what I wanted to build and actually see it come to life without needing to relearn an entire stack. So I decided to try building an app I’ve been wanting for myself. The idea is simple: every day, I log my health metrics (mood, sleep, steps, weight, what I ate). The app sends a check-in to my accountability buddies and creates a dashboard to track progress. Super simple, but I couldn’t find anything that already did this, so I built it myself with Lovable.

You can check it out here: https://healthbud.app/

It’s my first try so it’s obviously super rudimentary and probably still has a ton of bugs. But it does the job and it was a lot of fun to make, which is what matters.

Working on this thing reminded me of how I felt back in the day as a kid, just experimenting and playing around. That feeling of building something from nothing, seeing it work, sharing it with friends. I forgot how much I missed that. I’ll try to do more of this.