How a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex church event management system using Claude and Replit
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We do impact weekends at our church. We go to a local church and provide free haircuts, free eyeglasses, free car wash, free food, and everything. I handle registrations for these events. And so I said it'd be nice to have that computer somehow. So I wrote up a kind of an outline of what I wanted to do. We sent it to Claude, told Claude, we wanted for Riplet. Then we had him write a program and we sent it to Riplet then do the program. If you all told me the story correctly, John, you and your other grandson did this into the wee hours of the night. We started at 10 and finished about 3:00 in the morning. It's beautiful. You've got beautiful navigation. It's easy to read. It's simple to navigate. So, I have control of all the churches. And here I see all the participants that have registered. I have the services that are available. I have reports. And I can print this report out beforehand to know what people are coming. Do you have any wisdom or advice for us as folks in our professional careers are facing this technology change? It's just like AutoCAD. A lot of my friends didn't want to learn AutoCAD and so when I retired in '94, I still was working in 2018. I was still having fun. So that's another reason to learn this technology because if you learn it, you can be having fun well into your 70s, 80s, and 90s. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clarvo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. I'm just going to get to the punch line. Today we have John Blackman, a 91year-old vibe coding grandpa. He used Claude and Replet to build a very complicated, very impressive app for his church and he's going to show us how he did it. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by work OS. AI has already changed how we work. tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. 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So, I don't usually start this podcast with bios, but John, yours is too good to not give a little time to, so let me embarrass you a little bit with a quick bio of your experience. So, you started as an electrical engineer at Kansas City Power and Light. And then you left to run a hardware store in Oklahoma. While you were in Oklahoma, you earned your airplane mechanic certification. Then you returned to Kansas City and rejoined engineering, becoming the first in your department to learn AutoCAD in the 1980s, and you were eventually training others. You worked on one of the first underground fiber optic projects in the US. You were brought out of retirement to help launch Google Fiber in Provo and Kansas. And then at 91, you are vibe coding software using AI agents. Is there anything you haven't tried? Not yet. Not yet. Oh, and I forgot them. The the cherry on top. You've owned Bitcoin since 2018. You've got some Bitcoin, right? That's right. Yep. So, you have the epitome of a growth mindset. You've had such an amazing career, learned so many different fields and practices, and now you are into AI. How did this all start? Well, it's Brett's fault, my my other grandson. Well, I was talking about we do impact weekends at our church which uh we go to a local church and provide free uh haircuts, free eyeglasses, free car wash, free free food and everything. Kind of a ministry type thing. I handle registrations for these events. And so I said it'd be nice to have that in the computer somehow. And so he said, "Well, let's do it." So, I wrote up a a kind of an outline of what I wanted to do. We sent it to Claude and then Claude turned around and we said we were going to send it to Riplet. Told Claude we were going to we wanted for Riplet. Then we had Rip him write a program and we sent it to Riplet then to do the program. Okay. So, you had this idea to support your church and your ministry services and you just needed something that was more scalable than paper and you did what all my peers in technology are now doing which is ask Claude to create what we in the business call a requirements document and then you sent it over to Replet. So, Brandon, can you help us dive into the actual Claude chat and where this all got started? And I I think if you all told me the story correctly, John, you and your other grandson did this until the wee hours of the of the night. So you got started with Claude and then did it till, you know, 1 in the morning or maybe even longer than that. We started at 10:00 and finished about 3:00 in the morning and then we started the next day at 10:00 and till about 5:'lock that evening. Well, you are in good company because I think 10 to three in the morning is every Vive coders's schedules. So, you're good. Okay. So, tell me how you know you started here. It sounds like you started by asking if you could plan a development road map. So, you went right right to it. And Grandpa, what's cool about this I picked up on is that you have things like in here like if you need more information from me, ask me the questions right away. like you were telling it exactly what it should be doing. Um and then it started just going from there and you started providing information, right? Yeah. So you started at the top with a very general query which was how do I create a a road map basically and then you got the chat to actually ask you enough questions about your specific project that it could do a good job. So you have a draft of what you want the application to do and in specific you say it wants to be built on replet. How did you find out about Replet? Why did you pick that application? That was suggestion by Brett. Yeah. All right. My my Replet funds do not underestimate grandson influencer marketing for your agents. Okay. So he said let's just build it with Replet. And so you instructed the system that and then you know did you list out all these these ideas here? Were these from YouTube? Yes, we t I typed them up in a word document and then we sent that to clog. Great. So this is a very structured stepbystep what we would call kind of user journey or flow. So you're talking about registration, what data you need and then what kind of services they can do. And these are all wonderful services that you can get in your community. You know, haircut, dental service, those kinds of things. And then how did you come up with this idea of an impact passport? I saw that at another church one time. They had uh they did it a lot differently than I do it, but anyway, they had a little what we a piece of paper that the people would carry around with them to this event. And so we do that, too, but we do it by we would write it out by hand. And so the I wanted something that they we could print out and then they could bring with them to the event. Yeah. And so they'll sign up for something online. They'd be like, "Okay, you signed up for the haircut and you signed up for the face painting and then you signed up for the health clinic." And then they'll get their passport and then they know what stations to kind of go to. And like you mentioned, that was all done by hand beforehand. So, right. So what you're trying to do here is you have a bunch of manual handwritten processes correct that you're doing to run this event and you're asking Claude how do I turn this in to software and how how could I do this both on the volunteer side on the ministry side as well as the folks coming to receive services and so I see in this chat you're getting a a nice back and forth between you and Claude and then let's see what the road that looked like. All right. So, you got the core features for an MVP, the first piece of it, uh the admin interface, passport generation as we spoke about, and then data management, all that good stuff and a a bunch of development phases. And then it looks like on the side, Brandon, it also generated user stories and requirements. It did. Yes. And I see here it said QR code. Did you know it was going to do a QR code? Well, I had seen this done at this other church with for their passport. So, I wanted to do that in ours because it would it make it a lot easier because everybody has an iPhone now. And so, they can just scan that code and then it brings up the registration form for them to fill out. So, you were taking inspiration not just from your manual processes, but from ways you've seen other churches do this work. you sort of brought that all together, used chat to put that in an organized structure, and then we're looking at these user stories. Brandon, do you want to walk through kind of some of the key user stories here? Yeah. So, um, he's got the registration, uh, chunk of it right here, which a lot of this would be driven, um, from someone who's typically responding from like a Facebook ad or something like that. Correct. We have Facebook and we have brochures that we hand out about 5,000 in the neighborhood. Yeah. And this is the part that honestly even to this day I still can't wrap my head around in terms of just the complexity of uh the multi-tenant setup that he has here. So there's an admin interface and that has to have lots of different levels because and you keep me honest here grandpa you've got the overall impact organizers which sit at one admin level which is like we call system admins system admins and then beneath that you've then got all of these churches individual or local admins that then have their own admins and their own login and their own data um and visibility can go up and down. So the the impact admins, the system admins can see all the way down, but the individual church admins can only see their own church and their own events. And the system can actually approves all of the admin administrators. For those that are not on the YouTube or the video, I am smiling eartoear because you're building this complex what we call rolesbased access system multi-tenant. Uh Brandon as you said y complex piece of software with admin backend functions you know frontend you know consumer participantfacing functions all from a paper process and something that you just want to make better for your community. And so um I'm seeing those two kind of like major users. And then as we go down, we're seeing these user stories, which again are um I love user stories as a product person because it really lets you describe how you want the software to be experienced from the the users's point of view. And so, John, did you find these user stories were pretty accurate right out the right out the gate? They were pretty accurate. Uh, I made a few changes to him as we went through the program, but mostly yelled that he had pretty well described what I was thinking. Yeah. And I even see here, you're not just looking at administrators and users. You're thinking, what would the pastor of the church want? What would the ministry leader want from all of this all of this data? And you even have non-functional requirements. You are a very good product manager here. This is better than some work I've seen in uh professional organizations. Okay. So, you built this great set of product work with Claude and then this is going to blow people's mind. You you just took it to replet agents to start building it. Um so, did you download copy and paste this into Replet agent? Do you remember what you said? I just took and uh copied what uh Claude had put together and put it into Replet riplet and then it started going and there it was. Well, I have to tell you that's the official AI noise. It was so fast I couldn't believe it. Okay, so let's hop over to Replet and show a little bit of what what you've built here. I'm going to pause really quickly. So, I'm just looking at the side. You've got docs, migrations, you've got generated static assets here in these passports. This is a re this is a real meaty application here you built. So, let's jump to the punchline. Let's do a little world tour of what you actually built and then we can maybe go into some of the problems that you've been trying to solve lately with with Replet. start with we go in as a system administrator I will go into this LBC multiple which that's the the system administrator the LBC church is a local church testimony church is a local church and so forth so anyway I go into this and I sign in with a admin sign in what this does it brings me into the individual churches so I have control of all of the churches and then when I go in here then I can actually manage the event. So this way I could go in testimony church and here I see all the participants that have registered which a person would do. The local church would do this really. I have the services that are available and these services can be turned on or off depending on whether they are provided or not. If they're not provided you just click the button and it just says no service for that event. See? And then I have reports. And the reports I have is demographics. That's everybody that's coming to church, coming to the event. It gives their name and it's name and address, phone number, address, and how many people are coming like if they're bringing kids and put say three kids or something or three three participants. And it's in an alphabetical order by last name. And I can print this report out beforehand to know what people are coming. Also, this demographics report is used by the pastor as a followup for his ministry after the event's over. Then I have a service usage which tells me how many people use what service. So it will print out a list of how many used the pantry and how many haircuts and all this. So we kind of know how many what services were better used than others. And then the oil change, it will show when the people register with their VIN number. So, this gives me an oil report of what kind of oil filters and how many that I need for the project. So, and grandpa, how did it how do you know or how does it know what oil? We use a VIN number search uh when they fill out the registration, it will it ask them for their VIN number and then it searches for the VIN number and tells it what kind of filters used all that kind of name. This episode is brought to you by Orcus, the company behind Open-source Conductor, the platform powering complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows. Legacy business process automation tools are breaking down. Siloed lowode platforms, outdated process management systems, and disconnected API management tools weren't built for today's event-driven AI powered cloudnative world. Orcus changes that. With Orcus Conductor, you get a modern orchestration layer that scales with high reliability, supports both visual and code first development, and brings human, AI, and systems together in real time. It's not just about tasks. It's about orchestrating everything. APIs, microservices, data pipelines, human in the loop actions, and even autonomous agents. So build, test, and debug complex workflows with ease. add human approvals, automate back-end processes, and orchestrate agentic workflows at enterprise scale. All while maintaining enterprisegrade security, compliance, and observability. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems or scaling nextgen AIdriven apps, Orcus helps you go from idea to production fast. Orcus, orchestrate the future of work. Learn more and start building at orcus.io. That's o r kes.io. Okay. So, I just have to pause for folks that are not on video. To recap everything you vibe coded here, you have this administ multi-administration levels. You have data models for different locations or churches. You have data models for different events. You have data models for different services that can be turned on or off. You have a list of participants and real time reports of different ways those participants are either registered for events or coming to events. You have service specific software which will take I'm just taking a pause here. a a request for an oil change that comes with a VIN number and it will go I'm presuming make some API call somewhere to tell you exactly what kind of oil that car uses and then you generate a report for an event that you can export to Excel and use as a shopping list to go get oil or tell people what they need to bring. Right. Ju just that also these reports here's the oil shades report. See, it says the person's name and we have a check-in for the oil change then. Okay. And again, for folks that aren't looking, it's beautiful. You've got beautiful navigation. It's easy to read. It's simple to navigate. You have these little alerts and we call them toasts in the app that tell you when different actions happen. And then I know there's a whole participant side of this and maybe we can share some screenshots of that as well where people can register and actually get a little printed out passport um that they can take to the to the event. Yeah. Now the other reports I have is for the food pantry. This orders all the food for the uh food pantry and also for the lunch that we we provide a free lunch. So it orders like hot dogs and hamburgers and buns and all that that we need for the lunch. And then the vision center when we go to the vision center we need a report that will be uh used by the people running the vision center to know what the person's that is coming to the vision center what their age is and everything and that's filled out by this report and then we have waiverss that are signed by each individual so that the church is not responsible for anything. Yeah. So, let's look at that piece from the participant perspective because you've built some things there that I think are pretty cool. Want to go through registration? Yeah. Yeah. Let's go through registration. We'll just use Test Church because it's event. So, you put in your name and then the phone number. You have to put your phone number in. Okay. And your address. So, when you scan the QR code off a flyer or something like that, it'll bring this form. Okay. Yeah. And does it does it look good on a mobile phone? Yeah, it's pretty good. You can read it pretty easily. And then this one here is like the eye clinic. Yep. And then you say next. You can even do oil change here. So let's do the oil change. So you can see how that works. It has a pro lookup through oil change. And what what API is it hitting? Do you know? Open open AI API. Open API. Yep. Open AI's API. So here, see it shows that it's a five five W20 oil, six quarts in the foil nervous. So then you say okay and then this is the waiver that they have to read through and when it gets down at the bottom it's all filled in automatically and then you proceed to the signature. So watch out watch out docu sign you have a signature capture flow here. Okay. You can do with your your finger on your phone and then you say I accept the signature and then you say complete the registration. This is this is very good. Okay. I could I could look at this all day as somebody who built software. But let's go back to how you actually did this. So, one of the pieces of the flow that I think is so interesting that people would love to get into is this idea of looking up the this oil change. And so let's just say a feature like that I'm sure wasn't the first thing that you thought of. It was probably something you added after. So how are you chatting with Replet to add these features? And how much of the work are is it doing for you? How much are you researching outside? Can we look at some of those chats? Well, right now what I'm working on is having a name tag for the staff at the event that will be printed out on a word document on labels. So that way we could slip them into a plastic folder and had a lining around their neck. Cuz right now what we do, we write it with a marker on a sticky one and stick it on their shirt. And sometimes people don't want that stuck on their shirt or blouse. And so this will hang around her neck in a in a in a folder. So this is what I'm working on right now. It looks like he uploaded this first with this prompt here. Uh Claude then started to bring out some of these assets here. So there's the uh the template that it used and then eventually it started to code down here, right? And then he brought it over to Raplet. Yeah. Okay. So you wanted to make these name tags and so you had to add the idea of a volunteer into this already complex app. And so let's look through the chat that actually did that and how Replet built it. Okay, so it said a couple weeks ago you said that you want to add a function that will populate a volunteer list when an administ a local administrator. So you're using your rules fills an input page and then it says all the information that that you need in that. And so let's scroll down and show what Replet actually does for you. So with that paragraph of instructions there, you are adding a new table to your schema. So you're adding a data model. It's updating. So I mean, do you just sit here and watch this work? Are you totally fascinated by this? You just sit there watching it. I liked it. Yeah, I watch him. Sometimes he goes off on a rabbit trail and I have back and so this, you know, keeps going. What's interesting about this replet agent implementation as you can see here it's pretty independent. You're not doing a lot of back and forth with it. It's doing big chunks of of work for you. It does. And then do you pull this up kind of locally in the browser and then check if it works and gives it give it feedback? How is that back and forth for you? When he gets to a point where he says, "I think I got this, then I'll go back and into the program and run it. Let's see if it works." Then if it doesn't work, I tell him. And so it made a mistake here where it says not all events. You want it for the local event. So it's going again and making these updates. And have you found that you figured out how to prompt these agents? Are there any tricks you can share with us or do you just talk to it like you would anybody else? I just talk to it like it's a person like you guys teased me about too. Yeah. He uh he refers to uh the AI as a he. So the pronouns of he. Yeah. Perfect. Chat PRD. My AI is is a lady. So that's fine. And then you do do what all of us do with our AI, which is you just say wait. And then I saw another one that said stop. This is where he was going out on a rabbit trail. I said, "Wait a minute. Don't go that way. Stop and stop. Yep. So, one of the challenges I think working with these agents, what you're experiencing here is, as we see, it can do tons of work for you without intervention, but it's interesting that you can spot when you need to tell it to stop or reset or start over. It's pretty amazing to add these features. Now, I have to ask you, what was the most complicated thing or the hardest thing that you built here? The hardest thing and I finally got it about two days ago was it always doesn't work in production what works in development and that was very frustrating. And so in my production I was sending an email to the participant informing them that they had registered for the event and attached is their passport so they'll print it out there at their home rather than me having to do it at the event. in production, it would not attach that passport PDF file to the email. We worked on it for two or three days and finally the other day we finally got it working. But the reason we did, we had to change the type of uh PDF file format that we were using. And so the passport that we send with the email looks different than a passport that we have in development. So I'm going to give you some some real cred and credit here because if I just take a step back at what you've built, you know, everybody is going to listen to this and say, "Oh yeah, you can vibe code a registration app. It's just like a form." But if I'm looking at the comp the complete nature of what you've built, you have a very complex application here that's serving many different users that has security needs that has um kind of optin and waivers. You're generating PDFs. You're generating Excel files. You're emailing those PDFs. You're generating reports. You're doing all these different kinds of software development all wrapped in what I think is a beautiful UI. And just to confirm, have you ever coded software before? The only thing I did I in AutoCAD where I worked at Powerite, we uh bought a program called Intellad. It had logic files that we had to they allowed us with open architecture to make our own logic files. So I did write logic files for that to show that conductors were attached to poles and so forth. And so I but it wasn't really code like this. It was more like if then and plus if this happens do this thing. So but no Typescript. No. So this is your first time writing TypeScript and you know can you just talk us through some of the you know you said you use open AI APIs is replet recommending what database to use is it recommending how to send emails how much of that did you have to research yourself versus the agent telling you how it works no I don't know I I've looked at it I I've looked at the database to see you know what's what's in there parts of But I don't know what it is. Got it. So when the agent tells you use this to store your data or that to send your email, I think you're using Send Grid, you just take those recommendations and go. So for all of you coding agent builders out there, these out of the box integrations, John, I think make it simple for folks like you to add on new kind of technical capabilities without having to to research or make those decisions. correct. Now, that is that's a good point. So, I listen to a lot of uh other Vibe coders, and that's probably a piece of advice I hear a lot is that they will say just be open-minded. Like, when you go in, cuz I'm a I'm a technology guy. I work with software developers all day long, and we're very opinionated. Like, we know like how it should be done and what tools it should be done with and what the layer should look like. Um, I don't know. And sometimes that can trip up the AI because it's not going to naturally go that way, even if it's not the best way. And so it's interesting to kind of watch grandpa here just not have a single clue what it should look like or what it should do. And AI just makes it work for him, even though no real software engineer might have done it that way. That's true. Yeah, I didn't know. I don't want to call you out too much, John, but I noticed you're on the free version of Claude. Have you paid any money to replet for this app or is it is on the free tier? I have spent at this point I think it's about $350. Okay, so $350. What amazed me though was first two days the program was basically running and it cost me like $25 plus maybe 50 or something or I think I I put a a deal there. It cost me $171 when the program was running. And that's what Brett says, you know, it take his his uh programmers probably six months to do and we did it in two days. So, I'm I'm going to put some fear in the heart of the software engineers out there because you built some pretty impressive software. a couple days, a couple weeks, $170 in cost, free version of Claude, some some grandson time, which I'm sure feels like you're getting paid. You're getting paid. What has the impact been on your church, on your community? What I can imagine here is you can just serve a lot more people. Your volunteers are a lot more effective. Everybody's probably having a better time at these events because they're not stressed out about paperwork. What have you seen about the impact of what you built here? Well, to to begin with, they couldn't believe it. They said, "This blows me away." And so, I showed it to the mainly the uh the pastors that are in charge of these events, but we have not implemented it yet because I keep having little things I keep adding to it and some things are still not working exactly right. And so, I'm still working on that. But they were really they're ready to use it as soon as I can get it running. Right. Okay. Well, we're going to keep our fingers crossed that by the time this episode is released, you will have had your launch day for this impact platform. Well, that that's great. Okay. And I bet you uh will recruit some some volunteer developer assistants and I I even bet the Replet folks will help you out if we can get this in front of them. Okay. Uh, John, Brandon, this has been so much fun. Just to recap, you found a problem in your life and in your community that you thought could be made better with your words, not mine computers. You used Claude to create a requirements document, user stories. You downloaded those user stories. You put them in replet agent. As we've seen on screen, replet agent just through through all the requirements. You have this complex piece of software. You're adding to it every day. You spent a couple hundred bucks and I'm guessing you feel very empowered like you've learned a lot in the past couple months. Yes, I do. Yeah. Okay. It's been unbelievable. Great. Well, we are going to get you back. I know you're just going to code again till midnight. So, we're going to get you back to your coding uh with a couple lightning round questions, then we'll get you get you out of here. So John, my first question to you is we were joking before the show started. Logging in to these applications is harder than actually building the applications themselves. But if you can make an ask to any of the kind of coding providers to replet to claude on things that they can make better for your experience, what would your ask be? The biggest problem I've had is the it works great in development, but then when you produ have production where you actually want to use it, it doesn't transfer everything. For instance, right now I have a open AI key. It keeps putting an old key in there which is I think he says it's stored in a cache somewhere and it keeps putting this key instead of the the right key. And I can't figure out why he keeps doing that. And so I haven't been able that's why my VIN number does not work in production now, but it does work in development because the Open AI key it changes as we deploy it. All right. So you heard it here. Secrets management from development to production still still a problem. And Brandon, we had an example of something else that that John wanted from from Claude. Do you think we can pull that up or show that? Yeah, that's a great one. So, we were we were researching for the show his his chat history with Claude and um I don't know if you knew did you know that the history was over here on the left hand. Well, I asked him where the history was and he said he don't have it. Yeah. And so it'd be nice if Clone could say, "Well, here's all your chat history." He didn't tell me. Yeah. So I think you had the sidebar because when we first started you had the sidebar with all the history closed and so the very obvious place to ask where my where is my history is in the chat but these chats everybody memory is key. It was I looked all over I couldn't find it. Okay so the preferred UX is just tell me in the chat and point me to to my other chats. Okay, so we got good two pieces of feedback there. You know, my second question is what I love about you and our, you know, what you showed us here and your entire career is you have such a growth mindset around technology and embracing what's next. You know, when you when CAD was coming out, you told me this story where people were really resistant and you leaned in. I'm curious. Do you have any wisdom or advice for us as you know folks in our professional careers are facing this technology change that to some people can feel scary and to others feel really exciting? What's what's your wisdom having gone through this a couple times? I was mentioning this program to one of the people at one of these events and she said, "Oh, I'm scared to death of AI." I said, "Well, why?" She says, "Well, I just don't know what it's going to do." And I said, "Well, it does a lot of good things, but I'm sure it could do bad things." But I said, I think right now if you figure out how to use it the correct way, it's going to help a lot of people. And I said, that's that's what I found out here that this program it as a registration person, I don't have to do anything but stand there and hand out passports now where before I had to write all this stuff down by hand and all the material that we have to order, it had to be done kind of by hand or by somebody else, you know. So now this all these reports will be there and like the pastor followup uh ministry now he have a complete report of everybody that attended with name and address and how many people attended so he'd go call them and provide ministry for him. So I think it's been a good deal. I love that answer because I am like you an optimist. I have to believe that if we put the ability of into the hands of people like you to build something, you will take it and build something amazing and good for your community and good for the people around you. And this is something that wouldn't have never existed if these tools didn't exist. You would still be on paper. Um, so we get to get a little bit of your imagination and your impact on the world because we have this new technology. That's really great. Really great advice. It's just like AutoCAD. A lot of my friends didn't want to learn AutoCAD at the Power Light. And so when I retired in 94, I still was working in 2018. They had they had gone I don't know what they did. I was still having fun. Yep. So So that's another reason to learn learn this technology because if you learn it, you can be having fun well into your 70s, 80s, and 90s. Um building building good stuff. There's a lot of longevity if you can learn more. Okay. And then um we know that replet is a he. So we know how you how you speak to the AI. I am curious when it doesn't listen what do you do? I try I try to keep going around the corner with it and say try in fact I've told him several times go back in history to a certain point and use this what used to work and now you say it doesn't work. So go back and use that code. And sometimes it works because it we it was working before and then he broke it. I broke it somehow. He didn't do it. I told him I told him to do something that made it break and so and crash. And so he would go back and pick that up and it would work again. And uh mainly that's what I've been doing. And then when worse comes to worse I call Brandon and Brett. Okay. So, when the AI does not work, go back to a checkpoint or call phone a friend. Phone a friend. Phone a friend. Exactly. Okay. This has been just so fun. Brandon, thank you for nominating John to come on this show. You're going to be a hit. John, thank you for sharing your enthusiasm and what you built and your product and your openness to this new technology. Where can we how can we be helpful to you? Is there anything we can do for you? you can help me fix my VIN number. Okay, we're gonna get this. We're gonna hop off the podcast and we're going to fix this environment variable. Well, thank you so much. You all have a great day. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Byebye. Byebye. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.
Summary
A 91-year-old man used AI tools like Claude and Replit to build a complex church event management system, demonstrating that age and lack of coding experience don't limit one's ability to create powerful software solutions.
Key Points
- John Blackman, a 91-year-old electrical engineer, built a comprehensive event management app for his church using AI tools.
- He used Claude to generate requirements, user stories, and a development roadmap based on his manual processes.
- The app includes multi-tenant admin interfaces, participant registration, service tracking, and automated reports.
- He leveraged Replit's agent to automatically build the application from the AI-generated specifications.
- The system handles complex features like QR code registration, VIN-based oil change recommendations, and PDF passport generation.
- John encountered challenges like production vs. development discrepancies and secrets management, which he debugged with AI assistance.
- The project took two days of intense work, cost around $350, and was built using a free version of Claude.
- He emphasizes that learning new technology enables continued engagement and enjoyment well into old age.
- The app will help his church serve more people efficiently and improve volunteer coordination.
- John's approach shows that anyone can build sophisticated software by combining AI with simple prompts.
Key Takeaways
- Use AI like Claude to transform manual processes into structured software requirements and user stories.
- Leverage AI agents in platforms like Replit to automatically generate complex applications from high-level descriptions.
- Even without coding experience, you can build sophisticated multi-tenant applications by guiding AI step-by-step.
- Be prepared to debug and refine AI-generated code, especially when transitioning from development to production.
- Embrace a growth mindset: learning new technologies enables continued purpose and enjoyment in later life.