I vibe-coded an app for my Pebble watch and it made me sad
I had the opposite reaction to vibe-coding a website, and I think I know why
A quick non-security non-sequitur today. I promise I’ll get back to posting cyber stuff very soon ;)
I used Replit a few months ago to vibe code a few websites and the experience has been amazing. I have zero desire to do any hand coding for web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, typescript, etc), I just needed some websites up and running. One of these was the Destroyed by Breach website 👇
In fact, I just received TWO new submissions to Destroyed By Breach that I’ll be investigating this week!
Pebble vibe-coding
I’ve been a little annoyed with our smart locks, in that, I have to take my phone out of my pocket, open the app, and wait for it to connect before I can unlock the door. It sucks when I’m carrying a lot of groceries or other heavy stuff. One day, I thought: how hard could it be to create an app for my Pebble that does it for me?
Not very hard, it turns out.
A few hours with Claude Code and I had a functioning app. It’s on my watch, and it works! Just a few button presses on my watch and I can lock/unlock the doors. The experience building the app wasn’t great though.
The default “secure” mode prompts you roughly every 3.5 seconds to ask for permissions that aren’t really doing anything to make you more secure. My understanding (I could be wrong here) is that the options are:
pester you constantly for stuff that isn’t important
yolo, —dangerously-skip-permissions modes
It was exhausting, trying to read what the permissions were for and approving. I easily went through hundreds of these checks in the few hours it took for it to build the app. I was eager to get out of Claude Code.
The experience with Replit was nothing like this. Replit handles the full stack - the code doesn’t live on my laptop, it has the web stack for publishing, I can move between all my computers and even continue working with it on my phone. I think that’s part of what bothers me - I don’t want my work laptop to become a dev environment with creds all over the place and a mess of code, compilers, etc.
I’m SURE there is a better way to do this and would love some pointers - tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Claude Code-induced FOMO
The other big factor that made me sad here was that while Claude Code was constantly asking me if it could have write access to ~/code/pebble-app/whatever, it didn’t ask me anything about application design - about how I wanted the app to look and work. I probably should have written a detailed spec, but it was late at night and I really just wanted to see if it would work at all.
Where I wasn’t interested in building a website back-end, I’m very interested in how the Pebble watch interacts with the Pebble app, where the API calls are made from, how the authentication flow works, where the auth token is stored, etc.
I’m also very unhappy with the UI. The text is tiny and borderline unreadable on the watch. There’s no way to go back and reconfigure the app setup without deleting and readding the app. I’d like to eventually put this app in the Pebble app store, but only once it’s something I can be proud of.
I am NOT proud of this, in its current state. I’m a little embarrassed to be honest.
Could Claude Code fix all this and answer all my questions? Sure, but on my Macbook Neo, I have to close most of the other apps just to work with Claude Code, making it very difficult to casually jump back in. I have two other idle laptops I could have done this project on, but I don’t want to carry them around! I’m back to wishing for some remote, Replit-like SaaS option instead, or even something running on my systems at home, that’s remotely accessible from my phone or laptop. Am I now in danger of going down a Hermes rabbit hole?
I’m seriously considering scrapping this code base and just hand-coding it from scratch myself. I think it would be much more satisfying. Developing it more slowly would give me time to think about features and how I want UI/UX to look and function. I think I’d end up with something I would be proud to put in the Pebble app store.
Comments/Feedback?
What do you think I should do? Are there any vibe-coding setups you’re happy with? Are you still coding by hand? Any AI tools I’m not aware of that I should check out?
I should also mention that, while I’ve been aware of the Pebble developer ecosystem and tools forever, since before the Fitbit acquisition, I’ve never dipped a toe into it, so I might be missing some obvious options here.
Coding on a Neo is a bit of a stretch. Even on an MBA it still could be quite a challenge.
I've built things on both a 14" MacBook Pro and Studio M1 Max which are both well suited to full stack dev rather than LLM +browser + IDE on the Neo.
The MBP travels a little heavier than a Neo or Air but has added advantages of far more horsepower (12 core CPU /18 core GPU) and fans to keep cool.
Claude code can be quite useful for rapid app development with essentially little more than a vague idea, napkin scribble, etc. ideas.
I just keep in mind that using this iterative "treasure hunt" development approach can lead down ugly/dark paths, run into a ditch or two along the way and uncover odd stability /memory leak conditions too.
With all of the assumptions Claude makes, more human effort is required to refine flow logic, UI / UX elements, security and other aspects in a less blunt force way. This makes validation and testing even more critical to some extent as well.
Using this new shiny development method still leans toward more efficient use of my time though it can be maddening at times.