Vibe Code Your Iron Man Suit

Hey everyone, it's been a minute! Over a year, in fact. But I'm back with some stories, insights and ideas, and I thought it was the perfect time to fire up the newsletter again. Think of this one as a “Coat Rack“ to hang some thoughts that we can dive into deeper at a later date.

I love tinkering with technology but it had the feeling I was a bit in a creative coding rut. What did get me out of it? A $1 million prize pot, apparently. I participated in the the world's largest hackaton organised by Bolt.new, a 30-day coding marathon that I, of course, discovered with only 14 days left on the clock.

I spent those two weeks playing with Bolt, a pretty impressive low-code/no-code platform. I've tinkered with Google's Firebase Studio (a similar tool), and while that's tightly integrated with Firebase for database, authentication, and even Gemini for AI-powered full-stack apps, Bolt's output simply looks a lot better. It can even generate mobile apps, and integrating tools like Supabase for your database and authentication is just a prompt or two away. My favourite part? It easily integrates with GitHub, so there's no vendor lock-in.

For the hackathon, I built AdProphet, a platform designed to give you a clear picture of your advertising efforts. It connects your Shopify data with your Meta Ads to show you what's actually working and how much revenue your marketing spend is generating, it also generates a marketing report and recommendations using AI. It was a blast to build, but I'll be honest, the project didn't get the love and time it deserves yet. Wrangling Meta app permissions and configurations is a special kind of nightmare that even AI struggles to figure out. But hey, it was a great learning experience! You can check out a little demo below.

The crazy part is how quickly you can build things now. In the midst of building AdProphet, I also whipped up a UTM link management tool for the One Prompt Shot Challenge and even created a "hot potato" mobile party game with just a few more prompts. It's impressive how powerful these tools are becoming.

Now that the hackaton is over, I’m no longer restricted to only using bolt, so it’s time to ad some data engineering features to AdProphet and polish it further. I’m thinking of turning it into a SaaS demo.

This is the big question on everyone's mind, right? Everything is shifting so fast, it's hard to keep up.

• First, it was "everyone gets a GPT”! Basically, your own smart chatbot.

• Then it shifted to, "Let's all put our data in a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system!" This means letting the AI access and "read" your specific documents to give more relevant answers.

• Now, the buzz is all about AI Agents and hooking everything up to an MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server.

My main takeaway from all this? AI is a data product. If you and your competitors all have access to the same AI tools, the only thing that will set you apart is your data. Is it clean, complete, and accessible? If not, the smartest LLM won’t save you.

As for AI Agents, I think the hype is real... to an extent. You see these sci-fi-sounding use cases every day: agents scraping websites, writing detailed reports, and synthesising terabytes of data. And it’s true, AI is capable of doing these things! But from my experience, while an AI agent can do these things, it struggles to do them reliably every single time. An unexpected input or a weird line of "reasoning" can send it down a rabbit hole. A lot of people are saying they are using AI but I haven’t seen any companies of people that suddenly produce 10x more.

This brings me to a classic developer joke. What's the hardest part of a developer's job? Getting the exact requirements from the stakeholder. Since that's still the input for the AI, I think our jobs are safe... for now. 😉

All these thoughts were crystallised for me after watching Andrej Karpathy's talk on "Software 3.0" for Y Combinator. He argues that we're entering a new era where English is the new programming language, and Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming the next operating system and prompts is the new software.

The conversation around AI is so often about replacement. But the real magic is in enhancement. This brings me back to the title of this newsletter. Karpathy used the perfect analogy: Iron Man. The suit can do incredible things on its own, but its power is fully realised with Tony Stark inside.

We're now being handed the tools to vibe code our own augmentations. Whether you're using tools like bolt.new to build a tool in an afternoon, n8n to automate your life, or just asking ChatGPT to write a Google Sheets formula for you, you're essentially building your own iron man suit.

And I think that’s the exciting part: it’s never been easier to go from idea to implementation. To experiment, build small things, and see what clicks.

Thanks for reading, I promise it won’t be a year until the next one!