Dan's vibe coding starter kit · no coding experience required

Describe the tool.
Watch it appear.

Vibe coding means building your own software by telling an AI what you want in natural language.

There are lots of vibe coding tools available but Claude's a great place to start. It's free and it can wrap your vibe coded app up as an 'artifact' which you can publish and then easily bookmark in your web browser and share with friends and family (instructions below).

Easy as 1, 2, 3...

  1. Sign in to Claude
  2. Find an idea below, tap "Copy prompt," and paste it into Claude (the box that says "How can I help you today?")
  3. Play with what it creates and ask for changes (tips below)
For your own life

Bill splitter with a twist

Splits a restaurant bill unevenly, so the person who had three cocktails pays for three cocktails.

Countdown to the good bit

A big, satisfying countdown to your next holiday, a birthday, or the end of a house renovation.

What's-for-dinner picker

Feed it what's in your fridge, get three suggestions and a shopping list for the missing bits.

Habit tracker that isn't smug

A plain, private grid for tracking anything daily, with no streaks guilt-tripping you.

For friends and family

Pub quiz scoreboard

Team names, running totals, a satisfying reveal animation for the final round.

Gift idea vault

A running list of "so-and-so mentioned they wanted X" notes, sorted by person and occasion.

Family rota board

Who's doing the school run, bins, and dinner this week, colour-coded and impossible to misread.

For work

Meeting cost calculator

Enter attendees and their day rates, watch a running total of what this meeting is costing.

Feedback theme sorter

Paste in messy survey responses, get them grouped into themes with rough counts.

Client pricing calculator

A simple form that turns day rate, days, and extras into a quote you can screenshot and send.

Just because

A cheeky "days since" counter

Like the office signs for days since the last incident, but for whatever ridiculous thing you want to track.

A reaction-time tester

Click the moment it turns green, then see how you compare to your last go. Simple, but proper fun to build.

A decision wheel

Spin a wheel of your own options, whether that's what to watch tonight or whose turn it is to choose, and let it decide.

Or, if none of those quite fit: tell me a bit about you

Pick anything that's part of your life right now. I'll suggest something built around it, with a prompt ready to copy.

Tips

Describe the vibe, not the code

Say what it should feel like and do, in your own words. You're briefing a very capable colleague, not writing a spec sheet.

"I want a simple page where I type in a list of names and it randomly pairs them up into teams of two. Make it feel a bit like a raffle draw."

Point at what's wrong, not how to fix it

You don't need to know the technical fix. Just describe the problem as you experienced it.

"The team names overlap when there are more than six players" is all it needs. No need to guess at the fix yourself.

Sharing your tool

  1. Click the down arrow next to "Copy" in the top right-hand corner of the screen
  2. Select "Publish artifact," then "Publish and copy link," then "Copy link"
  3. Paste that link into an email or a web browser, where you can save it as a bookmark

Prompts for along the way

The blank-page opener

I want to build a small tool that [does this one thing]. I'm not a programmer, so please build the whole thing for me as an artifact I can use right here in the chat, and explain what you're doing in natural language as you go.

The "make it nicer" nudge

This works, but it looks quite plain. Can you make it feel more [playful / calm / professional], with a colour scheme that suits that?

The bug report

When I do [this action], [this thing] happens, and it should instead do [this]. Here's what I see: [describe or paste the error].