One hill I’ll die on is that the most underrated use of AI is vibe-coding. I know, I know. Companies are laying off software engineers left and right, AI labs like Anthropic are claiming software engineering will be obsolete before we know it, and a major in computer science is no longer a ticket to a six-figure job right after graduation.
Despite knowing all that, me saying vibe-coding is incredibly underrated might sound nothing short of absurd and tone-deaf. And sure, if we’re talking about replacing engineers, it would be. But that’s not the vibe-coding I’m talking about. In no way am I referring to the people churning out half-broken SaaS apps and calling themselves founders, or the idea that you can swap out an actual engineer for a chatbot and a vague prompt.
I’m talking about something far smaller and low-risk: using these tools to build tiny, hyper-specific things for yourself. The kind of tools you’ve always wanted to, but never could, because you didn’t have the time to learn how to code, or the budget to pay someone who already knew how. With vibe-coding, both of those excuses are gone. You describe what you want in plain English, and you’ve got a working version before you’ve finished your coffee. I’ve done this enough times now that I’ve got a handful I genuinely rely on every day, and a few more I think everyone should build for themselves.
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An all-in-one dashboard, built exactly the way you want it
Email, calendar, and notes in one place, and it never leaves your laptop
The very first “tool” I vibe-coded for myself was an all-in productivity dashboard. I’ve used practically every productivity app there is out there. Notion, Capacities, the classic Google Tasks + Calendar combo, Sunsama, you name it. They’re all good at what they do, but I always ran into the same wall: I’d still have a dozen tabs open at any given time. Google Calendar in one, Gmail in another, Asana for work, Notion for everything else, a Pomodoro timer somewhere in the mix. My mornings started with me just clicking between all of them before I’d done a single useful thing. So I asked myself the obvious question: what if all of this just lived in one place? That’s exactly what I built!
Using Claude Code, I put together a single dashboard that runs locally in my browser and pulls in everything I actually check throughout the day. It ended up with ten tabs of its own, a dashboard view, email, calendar, tasks, my article and pitch trackers, a Pomodoro timer, and a habit tracker, with Gmail, Google Calendar, Asana, and even Spotify wired in, so I’m not tab-hopping just to pause my music. It all sits on a local SQLite database, so my data never leaves my machine. While this dashboard I created doesn’t replace any of the tools I use daily, it saved me from bouncing between them all day. I wrote about the whole build in more detail over here, if you want the full rundown.
VS Code needs to catch up.
This is the one I’d tell everyone to build first, because the version you make will be shaped around your life, not mine. Maybe you don’t need a pitch tracker, but you do want your bank balance front and center, or your gym schedule, or your kids calendar. That’s the entire point of vibe-coding. You get to decide what earns a spot, instead of accepting whatever some app decided you needed.
A budgeting app that works exactly how you want it to
Every budgeting app gets one thing wrong
For the longest time, I managed my finances using a Notion dashboard. It worked, technically, but there was always too much friction. Too many clicks, too much manual upkeep, too much fighting the layout to do something simple. So I did the obvious thing by now: I built my own using Claude Code.
It’s a standalone app I host myself, and deliberately not connected to my bank account. I didn’t want that. Instead, I preload it with my balance and savings, and log expenses myself in plain natural language. It tracks my income, my expenses, and what I’ve got left, and that’s mostly it. I skipped all the investment dashboards I’ll never look at, the credit score nagging, and the extra features you’ll find in most budgeting templates and apps.
The part I’m most proud of, though, is a little “should I buy this?” tool I built into it. Say I’m eyeing a $7 matcha. I punch it in, and an LLM weighs it against my current budget and shows me the trade-off: if I skip it, here’s what I’ll have in a few days; if I buy it, here’s what I’ll have instead. For recurring items, it even remembers the last time I bought them. So, if I ordered the same matcha two weeks ago, it’ll gently raise an eyebrow, and if I just got paid, it’ll tell me I’m fine.
Ultimately, if you’re anything like me and tired of classic budgeting apps built on someone else’s idea of how you should manage your money, this build is worth your time. You decide what it tracks, how it talks to you, and where your data lives. Mine looks nothing like a budgeting app you’d download, and that’s exactly why I still use it.
A notes app that finally fits the way you think
Not Notion, not Apple Notes, just yours
If you’ve been following XDA’s coverage for a while now, you’ve likely noticed we spend a lot of time talking about note-taking apps. We have die-hard Obsidian fans who won’t hear a single word against it, others who swear by Notion, and a few who’ll defend OneNote to the grave. That is enough to tell you everything you need to know — there is no perfect notes app.
Everyone wants something slightly different out of theirs, and what feels intuitive to one person feels clunky and overcomplicated to the next. So instead of hunting for the one that finally fits, build it yourself. It can be as simple as a plain Markdown app where all your notes live in one place, running locally so nothing’s sitting on someone else’s server. I recommend tailoring it to your exact workflow! Add the tags you actually use, a layout built for how you write, a quick-capture box that dumps straight to the top. Whatever the dozen apps you’ve tried keep getting slightly wrong, you finally get to fix.
My word count is the password
My biggest enemy when I’m writing nowadays isn’t writer’s block. Instead, it’s the muscle memory that opens a new tab and types “instagram” before I’ve even registered I did it. Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, X — the usual suspects. So I vibe-coded a focus tool to deal with exactly that.
Here’s how mine works. Before I start, I set a writing goal, like 500 words. The moment I hit start, the tool blocks every distracting site on my list. They stay blocked while I write, and they only unlock once I paste in proof that I actually hit the number I promised. Since I know myself a little too well, I had Claude build a check that catches dummy text, repeated lines, or gibberish, so I can’t cheat my way out with a wall of nonsense. It’s not strict for its own sake; it just removes the easy exit, so the path of least resistance becomes finishing the thing.
I switched from Claude Code to Codex for a week, and the trade-offs surprised me
One week, two tools, a lot of opinions.
As with everything on this list, the shape is yours to decide. I built mine around word count because that’s what my work comes down to, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be a Pomodoro-style timer, a time-on-task tracker, or whatever your version of “actually doing the work” looks like. The point is that you build the version that targets your specific flavor of procrastination!
Your browser’s new tab page
One prompt and you’re done
Your new tab page is almost certainly the most-visited page in your entire browser, and by default it’s also the most boring: a search bar, a grid of sites you’ve already memorized, maybe a shortcut or two. Extensions like Momentum have tried to make it useful, but you’re still living inside the boundaries of what someone else decided you needed.
I came across this idea through Zara Zhang on X, and even wrote an in-depth article about it. She realized Chrome’s history lives locally, and the new tab page is the one entry point you’re already opening dozens of times a day, so why not make it actually do something? I told Claude about my workflow and asked for a Pomodoro timer, a place to brain-dump article ideas, a to-do list, reminders, and quick links to the tools I actually open every day.
Seconds later, it handed me the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then bundled it into a ready-to-install extension, so all I had to do was drop it into Chrome. Now every new tab gives me a focus timer, today’s tasks, an article-ideas board, my reminders, quick links to Asana, Docs, Notion, Slack, and Claude, and a motivational quote at the bottom that’s pointedly aimed at me (“stop researching, start writing”).
You’re seriously missing out if you aren’t vibe-coding for yourself yet
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: you need to start building your own tools. Just start with small, hyper-specific stuff that fixes the one annoyance no app will ever solve for you. You’ll be vibe-coding tools left and right once you begin, trust me. It’s addictive in the best way!
