I build small, practical tool prototypes all the time at the moment. They’re simple, but I want them to work or look perfectly, and that usually means hand-coding.

At the same time, coding everything from scratch is slow. So I bring in AI, but not like you see in vibe-style tools. I don’t just feed prompts and hope for usable cod

Instead, AI is my assistant. It helps me think through logic, troubleshoot tricky parts, and suggest options I might not have considered. I still decide how everything fits together, how it looks, and how it behaves.

For example, when building Clocks Dash I needed clocks that show day/night automatically for each city. AI helped me figure out the calculations and edge cases, but I decided how the grid should display, how colors change, and how users interact with it.

Same with my Tracker widget. The GitHub-style graphic was my design choice, AI just helped me wire it up efficiently.

The difference is subtle but important. With vibe-style tools, the AI often drives the product. Here, I stay in the driver’s seat. I’m also seeing what’s possible as a non-developer.

This means every tool is purposeful, functional, and exactly how I envision it. I get speed, but I keep quality and control.

AI doesn’t have to replace a human developer, it amplify an amateur one. When you build with intention and use AI as a collaborator, you get small tools that are both useful and thoughtfully designed.

If you want to see what this looks like in action, check out my portfolio.

They’re tiny experiments, but each one shows what careful, human-first AI-assisted building can do.