Oops I built an app
Vibecoding (part of) my job in 6 days
I was at the boarding gate on my flight to Jakarta when I looked up “How to install Claude Code”.
It was Lunar New Year. I was supposed to be taking the week off. But one fateful click and Claude now lives in my terminal.
And that was the last time you saw me away from my laptop.
The problem I wanted to solve
One of the most straightforward ways to repurpose a YouTube video is to make quote carousels. You’ve seen them: the split-screen ones where there’s a caption below a still video frame. In theory, a tool should automate this. In reality, the Ali Abdaal content team has been screenshotting frames, uploading them to Canva, formatting them for Instagram, YouTube community tab, LinkedIn. Then picking the best quotes, rephrasing as necessary without losing context.
Every. Single. Time.
I was so annoyed. Running a creator business means being a small team where everything requires your attention, and this was one of those tasks that felt solvable but never got solved. I’d tried building something with Cursor the year before but YouTube is really good at blocking bots that try to mess with it. Never got very far.
But the idea stuck. Stuck enough that I bought the domain youtubeproducer.app in 2025, per the encouragement of my colleague Dan who specialises in websites and domains.
The domain sat there for five months. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I just let it sit.
The ceiling I couldn’t see
My problem was never motivation or ambition. It was that I literally didn’t know what was possible. I wasn’t dreaming small. I just couldn’t see the ceiling.
I’d watched a fellow YouTube producer, Kent Heckel, build a competitor channel tracker (aptly named channeltrack.xyz) in a weekend. Like what the heck, a single person just did this?
Then Alex Dobrenko` insisted I jump on a call with him because he couldn’t believe I wasn’t using Claude Code. (Bro is persistent ngl.) I was already all Notion AI-pilled. It was good enough for me. But after 30 minutes of Alex demoing how he could move files around and make things happen in the background, my mind was fully blown.
He even showed me the backend of his course (codeforcreatives.com) and afaik Alex didn’t code. And he built that by himself??? Like slides, emails, account logins, the whole shebang?!
Seeing people in my own circle ship real products made the ceiling visible. And once I can see it, I can reach for it.
Six days of cooking
Once I got to my parents’ place, I unpacked the essentials (laptop + charger) and started tinkering with the Terminal. I didn’t have anywhere to be (I took the week off). My parents were busy working, so I did too.
I probably could have picked a simpler project but I’ve already done those with Cursor and ran with it. Now that Claude (and specifically Opus 4.6) was good at debugging itself, I wonder if I could fly.
What followed was six days of the most chaotic, obsessive building I’ve done.
I tried to get the app to take screenshots from YouTube videos remotely. Signed up for a server. YouTube figured out what I was doing and blocked me. Cancelled the server.
Maxed out my Claude plan. Asked my sugar daddy aka Ali for more tokens. Got ignored. (Bro has way too many Slack notifs.) Couldn’t pay for Claude with my Hong Kong credit card because Claude doesn’t exist in Hong Kong. Remembered I have a whole other citizenship. Paid with my Indonesian card instead. Installed Claudebar so I didn’t hit the limit again 😬
Tried to extract YouTube transcripts. Blocked again. Gave up and asked users to just copy-paste transcripts instead. Sometimes the right engineering decision is to stop engineering.
Needed an AI to pick quotes and rank screenshots. Tried DeepSeek ($5 loaded). Worked. Then didn’t when I introduced some constraints to the prompt. Switched to Gemini because it came free with our work account.
Sent it to colleagues. They wanted colour adjustments and font options. Learned that photo adjustment is “just javascript” so it wasn’t hard to add.
Deployed the site. Learned about DNS and all that jazz. Switched hosting to Vercel. Uploaded a Chrome extension to the webstore. Built a landing page. Added a paywall through Stripe. Added membership through Supabase. Made discount codes for friends.
Finally looked up from the laptop.
I did end up spending all the time between family gatherings to just cook in front of my laptop. But mygoodness was it fun. I even showed my parents what I was building along the way.
A few months ago they asked if I do much away from my laptop. I demonstrated this time around that even on my week off, I’m drawn into building stuff.
Oh, and the tool is now live on carousel.youtubeproducer.app ✌️
The journey in screenshots
What’s actually worth building
I made this tool live in six days. But the idea had been brewing for close to a year.
From idea to ship can now take less than a week (or maybe even hours if you’re a genius). And that changes the equation entirely. The scarce resource isn’t technical ability anymore. It’s discernment. Now that we can build anything, the real question is: what is worth building?
For me, it was a problem I’d been living with for months. I knew exactly what I wanted because I’d been the frustrated user the whole time. The domain sat there for five months not because I was avoiding the work, but because the right tool and the right window hadn’t collided yet.
Now youtubeproducer.app hosts a growing suite of little tools. It costs $0 a month to run. And one of the things that Claude has been really great at is just getting me into the flow. Every time I log on, I can just start building and executing on my ideas. Something in my brain, coming to life on screen.
Update log:
🦷 Lost a wisdom tooth. Pouring one out for a brother
⚔️ Migrated my personal site beckyisj.com away from Squarespace. Now it’s a real cute D&D character sheet!
🥹 Taught my Dad how to use Fathom via a Zoom call
👩🍳 Cooked dinner for some friends that were visiting down. It’s nice to now be able to host and also be a spot where people can mingle and meet
🎙️On the Small Creator Big World pod: Do you really need a newsletter?
📹 March creative update video up on Substack
Work with me: https://go.beckyisj.com/workwithme
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You are a computer wizard ! Very impressive
So. Bloody. Impressive! 👏 🔥