Part 4 of 11 — Vibe Coding for Non-Developers
There’s a version of this app that does a lot of things I’ll never use.
A self-booking system. Activity tags on every entry. A whole Hours tab with its own calendar and reports. All of it built, none of it essential.
I don’t think building those features was a mistake exactly. I think I built them because I was imagining an app for a situation I hadn’t fully thought through yet — a more complicated setup, more assistants, more coordination overhead. The self-booking feature makes a lot of sense if you have eight assistants and a complicated rota. I have a small team. We talk to each other.
Removing things felt different to how I expected. I thought it would feel like loss — time spent that came to nothing. It didn’t, really. It mostly felt like clarity. Each thing I cut made the thing that remained feel more purposeful. Like the app was becoming more itself.
There was one conversation with Claude that I keep coming back to. I asked whether the Hours tab needed to exist — it was a navigation item I kept forgetting was there, and I wanted an honest answer rather than a list of options. Claude said no, the functionality already lived elsewhere, and removing it would make things cleaner. Then, before I could even ask, it left the relevant line of code commented out with a note:
// { to: "/hours", label: "Hours", icon: Clock }, // kept for easy revert
That small thing changed how I thought about cutting. You can remove something and leave the door open. The cost of trying is low.
← Part 3: I Built Everything I Could Think Of. Then I Cut Most of It. · Part 5: Debugging a Vibe Coded App →