Howdy World 🤠 Let's Vibe

Howdy World 👋 Welcome to my blog. I'm Kurt — a software engineer with a longtime itch to build products of my own. I'm using this as a public forum to document the whole messy start-up experience. Follow along through all the lessons learned, the failures, the perseverance, and — hopefully — some actual wins along the way.

I originally got into software development over ten years ago with one ultimate goal in mind: create my own business. Years passed, promotions came and went at a healthcare and fintech start-ups, and that urge never left. It just got louder. So here I am. No time like the present.

I've spent my career primarily as a Ruby on Rails developer inside the start-up world, so that's the stack I'll be using to build and test ideas. And yes — I'm going to be leaning on AI to help me move fast. I'll be straight with you: I have a strong distrust of AI and some of the usages and manipulations we're already seeing in its infant existence. But I also can't ignore what it's capable of, especially when it comes to automating the kind of daily tasks that used to eat whole afternoons. The raw capability is hard to argue with, so here we are.

For a while I kept hearing about Vibe Coding and honestly never paid it much mind. Figured it was another tech fad destined for the graveyard alongside NFTs and the metaverse. I was wrong.

For the uninitiated, the TLDR on Vibe Coding: you send prompts to an AI to generate code, features, entire apps — with minimal human interaction in the weeds. I built this very blog by vibing, just to test it out, and I'm sold. It actually feels a lot like working at the Senior/Staff engineer level, where the job is less about writing every line and more about system design, code reviews, and mentoring — except now I'm mentoring computers and algorithms instead of humans. And from my limited time doing it, I've noticed that having a real software development background has genuinely helped me catch issues the AI creates and sidestep ones it doesn't even see coming yet. So I'm not ready to call vibe coding the end-all-be-all. But progress in this space is moving at lightning speed, so check back with me in six months.

The spark that lit all of this — the blog, the fast shipping, the "just do it already" energy — came from reading Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. That book was the kick in the ass I didn't know I needed. Combined with falling deep into the vibe coding rabbit hole, it became a no-brainer to finally start testing the ideas that have been brewing in my head for decades.

I've always been someone who starts projects and never sees them through, and I think I finally know why. It comes down to something Noah hammers on throughout the book:

That hit different. I've always been my own harshest critic — too afraid to actually ship my own projects because someone might reject them. Not anymore. I've spent years learning and observing the start-up life from an individual contributor seat, watching founders make decisions and thinking to myself that I could do that. Now it's time to find out if I actually can. Embrace the failure instead of fearing it.

I'm not entirely sure where this goes. I've been bouncing around the idea of starting a YouTube vlog — do they still call them that? — to document the vibe coding sessions and the different business ideas I'll be building and marketing to see what sticks. We'll see what kind of response any of this gets.

For now — welcome to the journey. Thanks for reading, and welcome to the ride.

🤘 Kurt