Neill's VibeAdventures in AI coding

Ride the wave.
Receipts included.

Field notes from a non-coder who shipped ~30 real AI apps without knowing what npm meant — every post welded to something actually tried, scars and all.

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FACTORY REVIEW What the factory watched this week: Fable 5, Gemini 3.5, and a wall of unverified claims.30 items triaged, zero adopted — why "verify before promoting" beat every shiny release this week. 2026 · W27 HOOK · ENFORCE I wrote the rules down. It broke them anyway.A rule in a file is a wish — the thing that stops the mistake runs outside the AI. ✓ worked MODEL · REVIEW Three other AIs found the bug mine swore wasn't there.A model reviewing its own work brings its own blind spots to the inspection. ✓ worked AGENT · FACTORY The AI knew all ten steps. The bottleneck was me.Swarm the jobs that don't depend on each other; sequence the ones that do. ~ mixed GUIDE The bug your model swears isn't there.Field guide — a committee of robots that don't share a brain, every scar, and a runnable cross-review.mjs. field guide MCP · CONNECT “Check my Notion.” It can't. It's in an empty room.A chat model has no hands until you plug tools in — MCP is the standard plug. ✓ worked SKILL “Pull the claims, dedupe, filter, format…” again.A procedure you re-type from memory is one you'll eventually get wrong. ✓ worked GUIDE I built an AI that refuses to help you.Field guide — why a system prompt is a character bible, not a rulebook. Steal Wanda's whole prompt. field guide HOOK “I'll remember to check next time.” You won't.Good intentions don't run on a schedule. Hooks do. ✓ worked TOOL Copy out, paste back, repeat until it breaks.An AI that lives in your project beats a chat tab you shuttle files through. ✓ worked GUIDE Drive the factory from your phone.Field guide — bots, bridges, remote control, every hardening scar, and a runnable telegram-bridge.js. field guide MEMORY “We use X. Never Y. Deploy like Z.” Again.Standing instructions belong on disk, not in your morning re-briefing. ✓ worked MEMORY · FACTORY “Which one is right?” Same fact, three files, three answers.Duplicate a fact for convenience and you've scheduled a future disagreement. ✓ worked GUIDE Describe a workout. Get a playable card.Field guide — the model fills a schema, your components render it. Clone the working app (MIT). field guide TECH “I have a working script. I just need a URL.”Sometimes the right tool is the small one. Flask turns a script into an endpoint. ✓ worked

The Sections

start anywhere
Factory Reviews

What we tried. What kept working.

Every week the factory triages the new models, tools, and vendor claims against real production apps. The evaluations are the product.
Products

Build the tool. Keep the tool.

The tools themselves — real things I built and use, extracted clean so they run out of the box. Bring your own key, never a secret.
The Story

From “what's npm?” to thirty apps.

Twelve months of staying with it — through platform failures, account disasters, and a 51/49 partnership with an AI that pushes back.