A creative experiment in rapid prototyping, learning out loud, and seeing what’s possible Vibe Coding within Claude
I gave myself a challenge: build 30 apps in 30 days. Not polished, but real, functional tools and experiences that solve a problem, answer a question, or just make something cool that didn’t exist before.
Every app was built in collaboration with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. Some took an hour. Some took an entire evening and a few rounds of “actually, can we try it this way instead?”
This is the running log. I’ll update it as each new app ships.
The Apps
| Day | App | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Birthright Calculator | Civic / Reference |
| 2 | On This Date in Movies | Entertainment / Film |
| 3 | Career Mapper | Career / Self Improvement |
| 4 | ADU Calculator | Real Estate |
| 5 | Wedding Day Timeline Builder | Weddings / Tools for Vendors |
| 6 | Things are Disappearing | Culture / Reference |
| 7 | Word Search Generator | Education / Tools |
| 8 | Kiloday | Celebration |
| 9 | Coming soon | |
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Day 1 — Birthright Calculator
Category: Civic / Reference Try it: [Link to live app]
The Idea
I want to move to Ireland. How many people have the right to a second passport and don’t know it? Countries like Ireland, Italy, and Poland offer citizenship by descent through parents or grandparents. Some go back even further, but the rules are scattered across dozens of government websites. I wanted one tool that asks a few simple questions and tells you where you might qualify.
What It Does
Answer five questions about where you and your family were born, and the app checks your dual citizenship eligibility across 30 countries, including Italy, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Ghana, and more. Each result includes the legal program, a match score, a plain-English explanation, and a link to the official government resource.
Day 2 — On This Date in Movies
Try it: [Link to live app]
I’m a film nerd, I wanted to find a movie for every single day of the year where the date is verifiably shown on screen, then build an app that auto-detects today’s date and serves up the matching film. A daily movie calendar powered by movie history.
What It Does
The app has two views. The splash page detects today’s date and displays the matching movie with its poster (pulled live from the TMDB API), the film’s title and year, how the date appears on screen, and a confidence badge. The full calendar view lets you browse all 365 days by month, with expandable cards, poster art, and today’s date highlighted in gold.
Day 3 — Career Mapper
Try it: [Link to live app]
I do consultant work in the employment sector. Career Mapper is a visual planning dashboard designed to help youth and adults define and navigate their professional futures. The app breaks down long-term career planning into manageable, holistic steps by allowing users to set a primary “North Star” goal with a target date. It features a map completeness progress tracker, a section to identify core values and motivations, and secondary categories for current work and personal well-being, ensuring users build a balanced, actionable roadmap toward their ideal career.
Day 4 — ADU Calculator
Try it: [Link to live app]
Vermont has a housing problem, and ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) are one of the solutions the state is actively incentivizing. But here’s the thing: when you’re staring down a $150K-$300K construction project, it’s hard to know if the math actually works. Does the VHIP grant save you money after you factor in the rent restrictions? Will you break even in 5 years or 15? What happens if you finance it versus pay cash?
I built this calculator to answer those questions.
Day 5 — Wedding Day Timeline Builder
Try it: [Link to live app]
The Idea
Working in the wedding industry means one question comes up constantly: what time does everything happen? Every couple has a ceremony start time in mind, but building the full day around it, backwards through getting ready and photos, forward through cocktail hour and reception isn’t that different from wedding to wedding and vendors do over and over again. I wanted a tool that does it automatically and hands couples something they can actually print and use.
What It Does
You enter your ceremony start time, flip a few toggles, and the app builds your entire wedding day timeline in both directions. With a first look? It restructures the pre-ceremony photo block accordingly. Reception on-site or traveling to a second venue? It accounts for transit time. Understand these are estimates,
Day 6 — Things are Disappearing
Try it: [Link to live app]
The Idea
Some things in our world are quietly slipping toward zero, and most of us don’t notice until they’re gone. WWII veterans. Drive-in theaters. Payphones. Fireflies. Cursive handwriting. I wanted a single place that catalogs that shows you how fast they’re fading, and tells you exactly where to go if you want to experience them before it’s too late.
Day 7 — Word Search Generator
Category: Education / Tools | Try it: [Link to live app]
The Idea
A client came into my office with a printed Career Word Search. Part of a job readiness program. She needed help finding the words. I stared at the grid for fifteen minutes and gave up. Then I took a photo and built a solver. Then I thought: what if you could make your own?
What It Does
Type any topic, pick a difficulty, and the app generates a custom word search on the spot. Easy mode keeps words going down and right. Medium adds diagonals. Hard throws all eight directions at you, including backwards. Diablo doubles the grid size, uses obscure vocabulary, and fills the empty cells with letters designed to mislead you. There’s also a custom word field. Type in your own words and the app guarantees they make it into the puzzle. No account, no API, no setup. Just print and go.
Day 8 — KILODAY
TRY IT and MARK YOUR CALENDARS – LINK
A kilometer is a thousand meters. A kilogram is a thousand grams. A kilowatt is a thousand watts.
A kiloday, then, should be a thousand days alive. What’s your Kiloday
Except nobody measures life that way. We measure it in years , uneven units tied to the Earth’s lap around the sun. And every year, on the same calendar square, we throw a party. Same date. Same cake. Same candles, plus one.
Birthdays are great. I’m not here to dunk on birthdays. But they’re also kind of an accident of orbital mechanics. The number changes, but the day itself isn’t really doing anything. It just happens to be the spot on the calendar where the planet was when you showed up.
So I started thinking about other milestones. Quieter ones. The ones nobody throws you a party for because nobody’s counting.
Your 1,000th day alive. (Roughly two and three-quarter years old. You probably just learned the word “no.”)
Your 10,000th day. (Around 27. The year of the cursed performer is really around 10,000 days)
Your 20,000th day. (Mid-fifties. The kids are gone or going.)
These felt like real markers to me. A thousand days is a thousand mornings. That seemed worth noticing.
What it does
You give Kiloday your birthdate. It tells you:
- How many days you’ve been alive, right now, this second
- Your next milestone, with the exact calendar date and a countdown
- All your upcoming milestones (every 500 days through 5,000, then every 1,000 after that)
- The recent ones you’ve already crossed without noticing
- A handful of special numbers along the way — 7,777, 11,111, 22,222 — because why not
That’s it. No accounts. No notifications. No streaks. Just a little instrument for measuring something we usually leave unmeasured.
Day 9 — Coming Soon
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Day 30 — Coming Soon
What I’ve Learned So Far
This section will grow as the challenge progresses.
Building every day changes how you think about ideas. You stop asking “is this good enough?” and start asking “is this interesting enough to spend a few hours on?” That shift is liberating. Not everything has to be a product. Sometimes it’s just a thing that makes you say, “huh, that’s cool — I didn’t know I could build that.”
More updates soon.
Chris Rodgers is a marketing and creative professional based in Vermont. He runs Forever Lucky Films and writes at chrisrodgers.blog.
Follow along with the challenge and see what’s coming next — give me a follow on Instagram at @christory.channel.
Christopher lives in Vermont with his wife, twin boys, border collie and corgi. He has owned a film production company, sold slot machines, and worked for Tony Robbins. He writes in his magical tiny house and sometimes writes in his blog at chrisrodgers.blog
Visit his author’s page.