#prototyping

I've used coding agents extensively at work, but until recently I hadn't tried building anything usable from scratch with them outside work. Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex have both been impressive, so I thought I'd see how they perform on greenfield projects. At work, code reviews are mandatory. Personal experiments have leaner quality standards.

This post covers the deployment setup and three vibe-coded apps:

• A GitHub Actions workflow for server initialization and application deployment to the cheapest Hetzner cloud instance.
• An attempt to turn my earlier post on AI-assisted software requirements engineering into an application.
• A web app for tracking my boys' virtual piggy bank — weekly allowances and errand rewards.
• A voice-chat web application and task runner for sharing the vibe-coding setup with non-technical family members.

Rapid prototyping is effective for requirements discovery and alignment, allowing stakeholders with complementary expertise to explore how an aspect of a new product or an improvement to an existing one works in practice. Prototypes can also serve as partial reference implementations, encoding a meaningful subset of requirements in an unambiguous way.