That AI App You 'Vibe Coded'? It's Only 30% of the Work.
Plus, new AI co-pilots for design and studying, and the fine art of automating everything.
Found a Reddit post that perfectly captures the reality of building with AI right now. Forget the hype; this is the ground truth.
💬 AI Can't Build Your App, But It's a Hell of a Co-Pilot
A founder on Reddit shared their experience 'vibe coding' an app, only to find that AI generated just 30% of the final code. The other 70%? That was all them: planning, refining, and doing the hard work of turning AI output into a real product.
Why I'm excited: I love this because it's a perfect, no-BS antidote to the hype. We're bombarded with demos of AI creating entire apps from a single sentence. This post from the trenches reminds us that AI is a powerful tool, not a magic wand. It shifts the focus from 'what can it generate?' to 'how do I best work with it?'.
Who should care: Anyone building anything with AI right now. If you're a founder, developer, or indie hacker, this is your reality check to stop chasing the 'fully autonomous' dream and start mastering the art of the human-AI partnership.
Reality check: This isn't a knock on AI. It's a reality check on our expectations. You can't just prompt your way to a finished product. The human element of planning, testing, and integrating is still where the real work—and value—lies.
Check out AI Can't Build Your App, But It's a Hell of a Co-Pilot →
Meet Your New AI Co-Pilots
The main story shows AI won't do all the work, but having a smart partner makes the 70% you *do* have to do much easier. Here are a few new co-pilots that look promising.
Ideogram Finally Makes Your AI Characters Behave
Finally, a tool that tackles the most frustrating part of AI image gen. Getting character consistency with a single reference image is a legitimate game-changer for anyone creating visual stories or marketing content. This is genuinely useful.
ChatGPT's New 'Professor Mode'
Forget flashcards. ChatGPT's new 'Study Mode' acts like a personal tutor, nudging you toward the answer instead of just giving it away. A smart move that makes the AI a better teacher.
Rustic AI: Generate It, Then Actually Design It
This is like Canva and Midjourney had a baby. Generate an image with AI, then jump into a drag-and-drop editor to actually tweak the elements. It's the post-generation control we've all been screaming for.
Let the Robots Do the Boring Stuff
The best AI tools are the ones that take the most tedious parts of your day off your plate. Here are a couple of new launches and a case study that do just that.
How One Founder Replaced a Marketing Team with an AI Agent
I love this because it's a real-world example of what I'm talking about in the takeaway. It's not one AI doing everything, it's a person intelligently stitching together best-in-class tools (n8n, ElevenLabs, HeyGen) to create an automated marketing machine. That's the future.
Meet-Ting: The AI That Handles Your Scheduling Nightmares
Another great 'glue' tool. Just CC this AI on an email thread, and it handles the back-and-forth of scheduling for you. A simple, elegant solution to a universal annoyance.
OpenWispr: Speech-to-Text That Respects Your Privacy
For the privacy-conscious, this is a big deal. A speech-to-text tool that runs 100% on your local machine. No cloud, no snooping. Perfect for dictating those sensitive thoughts or just getting ideas down fast without worrying where they're going.
Quick hits
AI as your non-designer design consultant: A developer used Claude to completely redesign their app's UI/UX. Another win for AI as a design partner, not just a code monkey.
The One-Line SDK to Rule Them All?: A new open-source SDK that promises to connect your AI agent to over 5000 tools with one line of code. Ambitious and one to watch.
An AI Bouncer For Your Brain: This personal focus assistant uses 'context-aware nudges' to keep you from falling down a rabbit hole. My ADHD is intrigued.
When is Early Traction Actually 'Success'?: Congrats, you got 100 users. Now the real work begins. A great discussion on what early traction actually means (hint: it's not the user count).
My takeaway
The obsession with AI generating 100% of the output is a trap; the real magic is in the 70% of human work that follows.
We're seeing a clear divide between tools that try to replace you and those that aim to supercharge you. The winners are shaping up to be the orchestrators and the curators, not just the creators.
Stop asking 'what can AI build for me?' and start asking 'what part of my workflow can I intelligently automate?'. That's where the real leverage is.
What's the most repetitive, soul-crushing task you'd kill to automate away? I'm building my own little agent and need ideas.
Drop me a reply. Till next time, this is Louis, and you are reading Louis.log().