Oct 23, 2026 Oct 23, 2026 2026-10-23

In the first episode of this Stories from the Vibe Coding Trenches I talked about accidentally overpaying $150 in Cloudflare fees. The second episode is a bit more optimistic. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. It’s something that made me understand – for free – that the user knows better than you. And your mindset needs to adjust to this. It all happened while working on Shape Walk.

Shape Walk is just a simple walking app: you draw a shape (triangle, square, circle, heart, star…) on a map of your neighborhood, then you walk the outline. I wanted something that keeps me in shape, while feeling funny enough.

If you prefer to watch the video, there you go:

If you prefer reading, here’s the rest of the story.

When I started building the app I had a few extra ideas. One of them was letting the app look around your current location and propose shapes for you. I didn’t implemented it. It felt complicated. I thought: “Users probably won’t use it.” Classic protective thinking.

After launch, a real person wrote back something close to this: “Instead of me trying to place a shape, why doesn’t the app just go out around me and find shapes?”

My first reaction was still the old one. Overly complicated. Then I opened my coding agent.

Half an hour later the feature was implemented. The version currently in the App Store can scan a couple of kilometers around you and suggest actual walkable squares or triangles.

The Real Story Isn’t the Feature, Though

The feature is nice and all. But the interesting part is what that revealed about my thinking patterns.

After 35 years of writing code I have well-worn neural pathways that push me toward the easy path and away from anything that feels hard. Those pathways were useful when every line had to be typed and every API integration carried real cost and risk. They are useless now. I would go even further and say they are harmful.

We can code almost anything we can clearly describe. The friction that used to force prioritization has dropped dramatically. When something still feels “too complicated” in my head, the odds are high that the complication is simply inexistent.

That doesn’t mean everything is free or that judgment disappeared. It means the default should shift from “this is probably too hard, skip it” to “let’s try it and see.” User requests that used to be polite “maybes” can now be fast experiments.

Key Takeaways

• Don’t take features out just because they sound messy on paper.
• Treat user feedback as cheap experiments, this is not scope creep.
• Keep the coding agent prompts short and specific. My half-hour win happened because the request was clear.
• Try to observe when old patterns are protecting you from work that no longer needs protecting.

Shape Walk still has the original draw-your-own-shape flow, and that’s the core part of it. The discovery mode is just an additional path for the days when you don’t feel like designing the route yourself. Both exist because the second one turned out to be easy once I stopped assuming it was hard.

If you’re coming from a traditional coding background, the biggest leverage right now might not be a better prompt or a better model. It might be retiring the part of your brain that still thinks some things are off-limits. There’s nothing off-limits now.