I Vibe Coded A Wellness App

A non-techie's experiment with AI-assisted building—and what it might mean for all of us.

First things first! I do most of my writing (and now, vibe coding) very early in the morning.

This week, I did something I never thought I’d do: I built a wellness app. Not “hired someone to build an app.” Not “downloaded a template.” I sat down with Anthropic’s Claude, described what I wanted, and by the end of the morning, I’d created a working tool I’m actually going to use. I hope it helps other people, too.

How I Got Here

My husband Matt is an economist, and he’s been using Claude Code for work since October—building models, running analyses, stuff that used to require him to write a lot of code himself. The way he talks about it sounds less like “coding” and more like collaborating with a very patient, very fast research assistant who knows every programming language.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite writers—Casey Newton of Platformer—shared his vibe coding experiment in a newsletter. He made the process of building the website of his dreams using Claude sound fun. Casey is a tech journalist so he uses a different lens than I do, but his journey stuck with me. It read like a wellness experiment, honestly. Here’s what I tried. Here’s what happened. Here’s what I learned.

I built my own website in a computer science class my freshman year of college. It was fun, but it also took most of the semester. The site’s background was dark and starlit like the night sky, with spinning Earths on either side of the words Liz’s World. It had a live counter that ticked with each visit. (I’m pretty sure that my professor, my dad, and I were the only ones checking it out.)

And then there was this LinkedIn post from Andrew Warner about building a food-logging tool with Claude. (It was the most-clicked link in Monday’s ATWW post.) He’d lost 20 pounds using a calorie-tracking app, then regained weight because the app was too annoying to use, so he described his ideal version to Claude: speak into his Apple Watch, the data goes to Notion, zero friction. And it worked. He built it. A guy who wanted to log his food without opening an app just...made the thing that let him do that.

So I decided to stop geeking out over what everyone else was building and just try it myself. Here’s what happened. And yes, the wellness tool I built is now live.