I began my very first Replit project in 2025. Replit, which just turned 10 in 2026, is a cloud-based coding platform — kind of like Squarespace or Canva, but for building entire apps, not just websites. The platform in 2025 was quite a bit less functional than it is now. It had just received a major mobile app update that allowed users to do pretty much everything they could do in a browser, now in a mobile app designed for Android (my preferred mobile platform).

I began a project I had in my head since before AI was even a thing. I always wanted to create my own language, but I never studied language, and I wasn’t an author, so I never had a real reason to. I just regarded conlang as a general interest — just another thing that inspired me about Tolkien, Roddenberry, and others who famously created fictional languages. Nevertheless, it began itching away at me. Finally in Feb 2025, I had to give it a shot and see what this mobile app that builds apps could actually do. Turns out just enough to irritate me, and not really get my juices flowing. But I began a repository — I think at the time I named it Lingua Craft or something like that. I actually really liked that name, but it wouldn’t last. I quickly reached the end of my free build credit and lost interest in the building aspect. I never lost interest in the cutting-edge field of AI. So I signed up for every credible AI newsletter and RSS feed I could find. I read a dozen articles every single morning before breakfast for at least a year.

Discovering Vibe Coding

Then in about Feb 2026, I kept seeing ads (not targeted, mind you, because I’m a ghost online) for a website I’d never heard of before called Base 44. The promise was that everyone can code now. By this point the term “Vibe Coding” made a daily appearance in the articles I was reading. I started dropping the term in everyday conversations to see what others knew about it. Turns out I actually knew some folks who were into coding in their spare time. None of them was familiar with the term “Vibe Coding,” but they proved to me that it was a genuine interest worth pursuing — simply by virtue of: if these folks can do it, I know I can. Not that I considered them to be any less intelligent, but rather I compared my digital lifestyle to theirs, and wondered why I hadn’t tried harder for how involved I was.

Why did I “know” I could learn to code? Well, for one I’ve always understood how coding worked in a general sense, and it never interested me. I was interested in what one could do with the finished code. That’s where language plus math creates magic. You used to have to type code. Apply code, test code, patch code, connect code — all in a written language form. By the mid-2000s, folks had long since written the base code that served as a foundation to our digital lives. By the mid-2010s they mobilized all that infrastructure and put it into everyone’s pocket. I was 15 years old in the year 2000. I had already built my own PCs, I was a regular online pirate, I even dipped my toe into the dark net. I was privy to the founding manifestos of the free and fair internet. One touchstone in my own life was the 1986 essay The Conscience of a Hacker, because it captured the exact feeling I had when computers stopped looking like school or work and started looking like a door into a world built around curiosity instead of boredom.

“I made a discovery today. I found a computer... this is where I belong.”

In my own life, that was the part that mattered: the feeling of suddenly finding a machine that responded to logic, experimentation, and obsession.

Gaming, Modding, and Getting Back to Code

That was swimming around in my head since around the time I saw The Matrix for the first time — around the time I chose to join the Singularity in one of the three possible endings to the video game Deus Ex. I was an avid gamer. A fantastic marksman in online combat games. A leaderboard-topping, crew-leading FPS master. By around the year 2012 I had given up gaming in the pursuit of “real adulthood.” I tried my hand at other real-world hobbies that weren’t centered around computers. My knowledge of the world grew. But my knowledge of computers and the new wave of mobile computers stagnated.

By 2017 I had re-discovered the joy I once had in gaming. I quickly fell into the art of modding — taking a game’s core files and tweaking them to your liking. Something which many games up to that point actively discouraged through digital rights management software and online security. Some game makers embraced the trend, like Bethesda’s games: Skyrim and Fallout. I got back into the world of code through modding.

I had built a half-dozen websites centered around my photography by now, but nothing took off. I felt like I was burning out on social media, and what started as a fun, paid hobby of photography soon grew to be a doom-scroll session on Facebook. I hated that feeling of helplessness and brain rot so much that I quit Facebook in early 2025. I had quit Instagram a year prior, and I would soon quit Reddit as well. These platforms for sharing were only holding me back from my potential. I joined Bluesky for the same reason everyone else left Twitter (now X). I began a new circle there. The Base 44 ads were relentless. I had to give my first repo on Replit another shot.

Building Craftlingua.app — the Vibe Coding Way

By Feb 2026, Replit had come quite a ways in capability. It no longer felt clunky and about to break. It felt solid. Things I asked it to do, it would do. Then it occurred to me that I was locked into an ecosystem of Replit’s design. As capable as it may have been, it was limited. I wanted to see what it could do without limits. So I began to discuss my plans with Google Gemini first, because usage was included for free on my Pixel 8. I would tell it where I was at in the build and it would direct me on what to do next. It literally typed the code; I would copy-paste that code into Replit, and Replit would build it. As I understood it, this was the normal way of going about app building in 2025/2026. Nobody literally wrote code anymore, I thought. Surely that had been done to death and we settled on the major coding languages you’ve heard of already: C++, Python, Java…

My impression of coding was that it was largely done on only the cutting edges of the digital technosphere. The core base of the internet had long been established. I was wrong. Coding is still done by hand-typing it for many use cases. And for many others, it’s done by automated software. Now a new property began to emerge from the substructures of the digital mind: Vibe Coding. Take all that base code, take all those automated tools, feed them into a large language model, and you can now speak in plain English to an “Agent” that builds your vision based on the vibes you feed it. You might start by saying something like: “I’m imagining a language construction app where users can design their own language from scratch and have it be repeatable and follow rules. I want there to be subscriber tiers, and a slick landing page that’s attractive.”

In 2025, telling this to Replit got me nowhere. In 2026 a phrase like that would kick-start a three-month-long daily building session between myself, Replit’s Agent, and Gemini. And that’s exactly how I “Vibe Coded” Craftlingua.app — an actual, bona-fide conlang app with subscription tiers and all the bells and whistles I could think of. This is the way. I could feel something begin to awaken in me. I quickly became hooked. I’ll never forget the feeling of pure magic coming out of my fingertips when I read my very own constructed language that I built on an app I Vibe Coded. Addicted was an understatement. I had finally found my life’s purpose.

What It All Leads To: MadFoodLoop

No, it wasn’t simply Craftlingua.app, but what I could do with this magic. I knew instantly I had to create the MadFoodLoop. I wanted to create a turn-key business that auto-fed the food pantries of Jefferson County, Wisconsin. Why Jefferson County and not my home county of Dane? Because the least funded and most needy pantries in all of Southern Wisconsin are in Jefferson County. Situated between Dane County (where the State Capital in Madison is) and Milwaukee County (where the highest population in the state resides), Jefferson County has forever been the squeaky wheel — never receiving the funding needed for its populations who have to commute to either of the major population centers.

I decided that if I ever became successful I would figure out how to provide endless funding for the neediest county in my state. I knew with the magic of Vibe Coding, and the limitless potential of software, I could figure this out. My first attempt at building a platform to handle food waste in Southern Wisconsin is up and running in a test phase at madfoodloop.com. If the model proves to be a success, the map will expand to the rest of the state, and someday the country. And if it ever makes money, I’ll donate the majority of that money to the Jefferson County food pantries in Wisconsin.

This is the way. Thanks for reading! BRB —Scotty