The Idea
For the last year, my sister and I have had a running joke about gnomes. We hid one in her yard after a party, and sure enough a different gnome appeared in our yard a few month later. This running joke spawned an unorthodox idea to create a weather app that felt like a bedtime story instead of a weather spreadsheet.
Enter Vibe Coding
The challenge is I am not an Apple iOS developer, nor am I programmer. I’ve never shipped an app. Enter “vibe coding” To create the app I used ChatGPT to generate the artwork and then leveraged Anthropic’s Claude Code model Fable 5 to explain my ideas and generate the app. I described what I wanted the same way I’d explain a design project to a friend to Fable 5 and it wrote the code iteration by iteration. Claude would go build it; I’d squint at the result, play with the beta app, tell Fable what felt off, and we’d run it again, and again. In the end it took 14 iterations to get everything working just right.
The Hard Parts
Should a Weather Gnome app have fireflies floating in the background? Yes it should! That’s vibe coding, you bring the idea and the vision and the model bakes the code for you. It is exactly as fun and empowering as it sounds. I would have a new working feature in twenty minutes and then I would spend two hours arguing with the AI about the app having the wrong temperature or city forecast.
Anybody who tells you the AI can do everything is trying to sell you something. You must trust but verify. Fable 5 could write the app, but it couldn’t click the buttons for me. I still had to wrangle with getting an Apple developer account, working with Xcode, provisioning profiles, certificates, and App Store Connect; a stack of Apple bureaucracy that makes rebuilding a CNC machine look relaxing. (I underestimated the total time. I always underestimate the total time.)
And I made mistakes. There was a stretch where every gnome showed up with the wrong name, and another where a summer beach gnome would appear on a snowy forecast. Vibe coding doesn’t skip the debugging, it just gives you a very patient partner to debug with.
Approved!
I submitted the app for approval to Apple and then two days later it was approved! Then released. Then live! Weather Gnome, a real thing with a real App Store page, made by a guy whose background is decidedly not programming or making apps.
Some Thoughts
- You don’t need permission to build software anymore.
If you can describe it clearly and iterate stubbornly, you can build it and you can ship it. It’s time to build! - Ideas and testing are the hard part, not programming.
- The AI writes the code; deciding what’s good is still your job.
Are gnomes good? The jury is still out! - Budget for the boring 20%.
The last mile; signing, final reviews, the fine details cursed trader takes longer than the fun part.
If you’ve been sitting on an idea telling yourself you “can’t code”, I would gently push back on that presumption. I couldn’t either, really. I just kept describing what I wanted until it existed!
Weather Gnome is on the App Store now! Go find the gnome who lives in your weather!
