It’s not polished. It’s not done. But I’m not waiting for perfect. Just shipping. I vibe coded koreanbabymeals.com in 3 nights using Claude Code. No IDE. Just me trying to solve a real problem I have as a mom. I’ll take that over another AI thought piece.
The idea came from trying to figure out what to feed my baby, now that she can eat almost anything. I spend SO much time planning, researching, shopping, chopping... I needed a recipe site where I can search by the ingredients I already have, prioritize meals that work with a food processor and freezes well, and filter by how messy it is to eat because sometimes I just don’t have the energy to clean up the saucy aftermath. I wanted more variety and a way to bring in Korean ingredients. I’m not especially in tune with my Korean heritage, but I want my daughter to grow up knowing it and feeling proud of it.
Reading through the AI hype made me wonder what’s actually being built, and whether any of it helps regular people, not just the tech crowd. I’ve contributed to the noise myself (🫠), so I decided to pick a real-life problem and vibe code the solution into existence.
My personal Macbook is old enough that installing Node took forever. Setup friction was high — same problem I run into at work. While that was installing though, I collaborated with Claude by giving it my vision and working together on the initial prompt to give to Claude Code. I still remembered enough frontend to care about how things are structured. Mobile-responsive, no JavaScript errors, and decent SEO. I added a cookie consent banner (for Google Analytics) because I’ve done compliance work before and didn’t want to skip the basics.
I had to relearn a lot: next.js, how to work with my hosting provider’s constraints, how to automate as much of the deployment as I can. Back when I was coding full-time, deployment meant FTP and Jenkins. Now I needed to figure out how to integrate GitHub into my hosting flow — and how to work around memory constraints on my plan.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people theorize about AI and tooling. But I wanted to see what I could actually ship, to actually make something with the tools we keep talking about.
If you’re building something too or curious how I approached this, I’m happy to share what I learned. Not as an expert — just to trade notes.
You can find the repo here: https://github.com/earlyspark/korean-baby-meals — I’ll be adding more recipes over time since I plan to keep using the site myself, but it’s mainly a learning project for now. Let me know what you think!
This post was originally on LinkedIn.