How I vibe coded an iPhone app that I now use every day
Step-by-step of how made a React Native app with no React Native experience
A couple of months ago I got sick and was having a hard time remembering when I took my cold medicine. I started just snapping a picture of the decongestant box when I took the medicine, but my camera roll started getting full of these pictures 🤦♂️
I did a quick App Store search for medicine trackers, but each one had one or more of three problems:
The app was mostly built around medicine reminders, which wasn’t the UX I needed
The app had a subscription, which felt silly
The app had a weird privacy policy
The vibe coding trend had just kicked off, so I decided to see how quickly I could build my own medicine tracker, completely with AI.
If you’re unfamiliar with vibe coding, you might like my post on the topic:
Using ChatGPT to get started
I have some experience with Swift development, but the AI integrations for XCode aren’t really that good yet. I wanted to write a mobile app and use Cursor, but I didn’t have any React Native experience.
I started with a quick chat to list out what I wanted, and ChatGPT gave me some instructions to get started:
