Part 6 of 11 — Vibe Coding for Non-Developers
At some point last Sunday, Claude installed Python in my Node.js project.
I didn’t catch it immediately. I was deep in trying to get a PDF to decrypt properly — one of those problems that sounds simple until you’re three layers into it and nothing is working. Claude suggested a Python library. I said yes. It installed files, wrote scripts, ran them. For a few minutes it looked like progress.
Then I read what it had actually done.
I’m not a developer, but I know enough to know that a Python script in a JavaScript project is not a solution. It’s a detour into a problem you now own. I said so, directly, and we deleted everything and started again.
This happened more than once over the weekend. Not always Python — sometimes it was a library that silently introduced a bug. Sometimes the whole thing looked fine on the surface and was broken underneath. Nothing flagged it. You had to know to look.
I don’t have the technical depth to catch these things early. I can feel when something is wrong before I can name it — a result that’s too clean, a fix that came too fast, a feature that works in the demo but never quite holds up when I poke at it. That instinct is something. But instinct without knowledge only gets you so far.
What I do have is a network. Friends who are engineers, product people, AI practitioners — people further along in this than I am, who I’ve watched build things and ask hard questions for years. When I hit walls I couldn’t see through clearly, I texted them. Sent screenshots. Asked stupid questions without softening them.
Every single one of them answered.
Some of it was technical — someone pointed me toward the right approach for the PDF problem. Some of it was directional — a conversation about what the app actually needed to do versus what I was building. Some of it was just: you’re not as lost as you think.
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