AI versus Marshy - Vibe coding an app

I’ve been talking about the power of automation and AI in recent newsletters, and I wanted to share a personal project I’ve been working on - building a quiz app that uses these tools to help founders understand what I do. I’ve been experimenting with different tools and techniques, and I’m excited to share this project with you. In this article, I’ll walk you through how I used AI and automation to build this app, and what I learned along the way. Sarah: ⁠But right now, AI companies are just gobbling up all of that material for free. That’s what the artists are calling theft. Do you think that should stop? Scott: I think that the benefits of The large language models and so forth that we’ve got outweigh, like, um, you know, those issues. Sarah: So hang on. You’re saying that the benefits of the large language models outweigh the rights of individual Australian artists to create distinct Australian content. Scott: Uh, I think you’re saying—do I think that these models are going out and training themselves on the entire internet? Sarah: Yes. Scott: Like, I think there are benefits to that. ​ ruh-roh ​ But what I will say is that the tools are getting exceedingly good for doing new things. Over the last 12 months I’ve been building increasingly more sophisticated automations for my clients that help them create new content. One one end of the spectrum you’ve got specific research that gives a business a great reason to reach out to another customer ( hey - I noticed you posted 40 jobs in the last 3 months ) and on another end there’s the ability to create entirely new assets for them ( I noticed your expensive video has 300 views and goes for 10 minutes, I’ve choppped this into social-media friendly cuts ). But I haven’t done as much for my own business. So this week I’ve been building a quiz app that moves founders through 15 questions about their business in a way that’s easy to answer, gives them a sense of what I do work on, and gives them a report at the end. Here’s some of the things I did: Fed a YouTube video transcript describing the quiz method into an LLM and asked it to summarise what I needed to do Fed Claude examples of recent quotes, discovery call transcripts, and pitch videos to summarise what I’ve been doing client-work wise and unearth some suggested discovery questions Designing the questions and introductory copy Asking Perplexity to unearth all of the challenges with connecting Lovable.dev (an app builder) with Airtable (my database of choice) and what the potential workarounds are Giving that information to Claude Code in VS Code and Kilo and then building a back-end database structure that suits the above Uploading and then checking the data in Airtable with an unofficial MCP server Settting up a database in Supabase with its MCP to connect and parse data to Airtable Generating a prompt to share to Lovable and building a front-end for the quiz app Exporting it into Github and then refining the build with my code editor ​ Well are you? ​ I am not a coder. But what’s possible now is pretty good if you know how to leverage it and those barriers are going to keep getting lower. I don’t think these tools are going to help you “print money” or whatever the hell these hype guys pitch - but I do believe there’s a lot of benefits to be had in learning how to do things like this over time . – And to illustrate that point and to keep rewarding the people that read these things through to the end (I see you and <3 you) - I’ve finally got off my bottom and shipped the working Skool community - GrowTechGood and a functioning about page . ​ Come lurk ^_^ I’m making it free to join for the first 50 members and will answer any questions you’ve got about this stuff. I’ve been getting a lot of good questions in the webinars and so here’s a vehicle for getting answers. (Apologies to the people that joined the old one I had to close it to get the better URL - https://www.skool.com/growtechgood/about ) Thanks and have a great weekend! -Marshy p.s. I’ve had a few people ask what I’ve been doing client-wise since my last big project and did a post about it here ​ Dad sending a video to Mum with one of the boys while she’s at work Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy 67 - adhd tricks, building in public, and vibe coding