Vibe Coding is a System Design Interview

By Brendan Long on February 26, 2026

I’ve been working on some fairly large vibe-coded apps (like Lion Reader), and my process has converged on:

Write a GitHub issue
(If complicated enough) tell an agent to make a plan and then update the issue
Have another agent read the issue and implement it

As the features get more complicated, I spend more and more time on step (1), and I’m finding that just taking the time to write a detailed enough issue is 90% of the work (and if I have a problem, going back and writing a much more detailed issue usually fixes it). The thing I realized this morning is that writing these issues and working through the plans is very similar to participating in a system design interview: You don’t need to implement anything, but you do need to have a good high-level design, and think through all of the edge cases and tradeoffs.

A sketchnote equating two scenes with a large equals sign: on the left a nervous person presents an architecture diagram at a whiteboard to an interviewer, and on the right the same person relaxes at a laptop while the identical diagram floats out to a friendly robot.

My RSS Reader is Done

By Brendan Long on February 22, 2026

I posted a few months ago about vibe-coding an RSS reader. The mood on the internet seems to be that these apps are buggy and never get finished, so I figured it was worth posting an update. Another thousand commits later, Lion Reader supports every feature I care about, works reliably, has very good performance, and is open for public signups.

Lion Reader showing an article from Andrej Karpathy's blog about microgpt, with a sidebar listing feed categories like Articles, Comics, and Starred, and action buttons for Full Content, Listen, and Summarize

Channelguessr: A Discord game

By Brendan Long on January 25, 2026

I’m part of a small Discord server and thought it would be funny to make a Geoguessr-style game where you get presented with a random interesting message from the server and have to guess when, where and by who it was posted.

Discord bot message showing 'Round Complete!' with the answer revealed: Channel, Posted date of July 22, 2025 at 3:06 PM (6 months ago), Author, and a 'Jump to message' link. Results show one player earned 100 points, with an X for incorrect channel guess and +100 for time.

Clawed Abode: Claude Code is Too Cloudy

By Brendan Long on January 24, 2026

Running Claude Code locally is annoying since you have to deal with permissions and agents interfering with each other (and you have to be at your computer), but running Claude Code on the web is annoying because the cloud environment is so limited.

What if we could run Claude Code for the web but on our machines? Through the magic of Claude Code writing Claude Code code, I made a local app for this.

Announcing Clawed Abode: A web app you can run on your own home computer which runs Claude Code without permission prompts in ephemeral containers, and with the ability to install packages, run containers, use caches, and access the GPU.

Clawed Abode session showing Claude running nvidia-smi, displaying an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU with CUDA 13.0 available inside the container

Claude Wrote Me a 400-Commit RSS Reader App

By Brendan Long on January 04, 2026

In the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with the newest version of Claude Code, which wrote me a read-it-later service including RSS, email newsletters and an Android app.

Software engineering experience was useful, since I did plan out a lot of the high-level design and data model and sometimes push for simpler designs. Overall though, I mostly felt like a product manager trying to specify features as quickly as possible. While software engineering is more than coding, I’m starting to think Claude is already superhuman at this part.