In the last few months I shipped eighteen products. iOS apps. Mac apps. Web platforms. A DaVinci Resolve plugin. A WordPress plugin. Some took hours. Some took weeks. All of them used AI as a core part of the development process.

I am going to walk through every single one, how I built them, and then I want to talk about why vibe coding scares me.

The full list

iOS apps. Skim Reader lets you take an article and use a slider to decide how long a summary you want. I find articles I want to read but they are pages and pages long and sometimes I just want the key points. Took a few hours to build. Hierolyte is a hieroglyphic flashcard system because I am studying hieroglyphics and there was not one, so I built it. Notami is a notes app where notes are connected to specific people in your life so I can keep track of birthdays and life events and how I feel about people. I had been trying to build this for years with Flutter and could never get it right. With AI tools I coded it very quickly. Quiet Mirror is a journalling app that detects patterns over time and asks you questions to help you reflect on who you are. WhenSuitsYou is for coordinating meetings across time zones because trying to sort out schedules between people in different countries is an absolute nightmare.

Mac apps. Aetheria is a floating scratchpad you can drag files, images, and bookmarks onto so you can quickly refer to them without digging through folders. EvaporateMyPDF strips the images out of PDFs and replaces them with placeholders so the file is small enough for AI tools to process. FreshenApp sits in the menu bar and tells me which apps on my Mac need updating. There used to be an app called MacUpdate that did this but it got retired and the replacements were all bloated. LinkMinder monitors my clipboard for any links I copy and keeps a list of them because we have all been there where we copied a link and then need it later and have no idea where it went. QuickRedact is a menu bar app where I drag an image onto it and AI automatically detects faces, license plates, emails, credit card numbers and redacts them. ScreenshotScribe watches a folder for new screenshots and renames them based on what is actually in the image because there is nothing more annoying than a folder full of files called Screenshot 2026-03-01. Sniptique is a clipboard manager that is simple and fast and does not try to be anything else.

DaVinci Resolve. SmartProxyCreator lets you select clips on the timeline and export them as individual files with all your changes preserved, because for some reason Resolve cannot do this natively.

WordPress. LinkLord scans a WordPress site for broken links and dead pages.

Web apps. Cinecouture Magazine is an online reader for a friend’s cinema magazine. Took an evening. Pythia is a screenwriting companion with AI analysis, gamification, streaks and badges. I am writing a pilot for Netflix and I am a terrible procrastinator so I built a tool that motivates me. Took about a day. Timezone Wrangler is the web version of the timezone coordination app. LinkMinder has a website with a subscription model.

In development. Vivant is meal plan automation for a French nutritionist. Butter Language School is an English teaching platform for a friend in Colombia.

How I actually work

It starts with a problem. Something that annoys me or a process that is too complicated. Once I realise it can be broken down into simple actionable steps, I sit down with Claude on the desktop app and we plan it out. I explain what I want. Claude asks me questions. We bounce the idea back and forth until there is a clear picture.

Then I ask Claude to build me a project document, an implementation plan, and a spec. I set up a GitHub repository so I can track changes and roll back if things go wrong. Then I switch to Claude Code on the command line and start building.

It happens in stages. I review each stage, test it locally, make notes, approve it, get it deployed, and then the next stage begins. I document everything and I ask the AI to document everything so I can go back and fix bugs in the future.

No standup meetings. No Jira boards. No sprint ceremonies. Just a problem, a plan, and iterative execution.

Why vibe coding worries me

When the iPhone first came out, the pitch was that everyone had a high-quality camera now so everyone was going to become a filmmaker. And while there have been some great iPhone films, that mostly did not happen. You still need to understand storytelling and composition and pacing. The camera is just the camera.

I think the same thing is happening with vibe coding. People see it as talking to their computer and having it build them an app. If you go on Reddit you can see tons of apps that people have built and deployed this way. A lot of them look great in a screenshot.

The problems come later.

AI does not necessarily think about edge cases. It does not worry about what happens when a user does something unexpected. It does not automatically consider GDPR compliance or data privacy or whether the API keys it just hardcoded into the frontend are visible to anyone who opens their browser developer tools. I have seen apps that store passwords in plain text. Apps that send sensitive data over unencrypted connections. Apps that completely fall apart when someone enters an emoji where the developer expected text.

An experienced developer catches this stuff because they have seen it go wrong before. They know what to check. An AI can miss it. And an inexperienced developer will not know to ask.

We are in a dangerous time where people with little to no development experience believe they are developers. They do not understand that they still need technical knowledge and security experience and wisdom to create things that are safe for other people to use. The tools will improve. But right now, an experienced hand still matters.

What business owners should ask their developer

Talk to them about their history. Not just whether they can produce an app, but their experience with security, business processes, working with clients. Do they have a track record?

Because it is all very well for somebody to suddenly decide they are a developer. But they might be a nightmare to work with. They might be unreliable. They might lose access to the AI tools they used to build the app, and then the business owner is stuck with something they have no idea how to fix.

An inappropriately developed app could expose personal information, corrupt data, or give a hacker access to private systems. The developer needs to understand all the potential risks and be able to talk through them with you clearly.

The one I am most proud of

People always ask this. My answer is FreshenApp. I use it every day. I love keeping my Mac up to date and I am proud of how lean and efficient and fast it is.

And that to me is the whole point. I can build a tool that is completely and utterly tailored to what I need. I do not have to compromise. I do not have to pay for bloated features I will never touch. I get the thing I actually want and nothing else.

That principle applies whether I am building something for myself or for a client. Strip away the bloat. Solve the actual problem. Ship it.