🛫 I Vibe Coded a Website at 35,000 Feet 🛬

#ai #programming #agents #webdev

🛫 Wheels up and I had three hours with nothing but airplane Wi-Fi...

So naturally, I decided to vibe code an entire website before landing.

I've written about Waddles before, so I thought, what if I created him a little home on the web.

So I got myself connected to the Delta Wi-Fi, cracked open Codex, and got to prompting.

For my agentic workflow, I start by describing the MVP requirements to my agent in the chat and have it write out the plan to a markdown file.

This allows me to ideate and steer the agent along the way with how I want the stack to look. You can see my iterations of the PROMPT.md over time.

I configured things like what tech stack we wanted to use, how we wanted to deploy, as well as the basic idea for the website.

What was the original tech stack I landed on?

Category	Stack
Frontend	React 19, TypeScript
Build	Vite 8
Tooling	Node.js 24, pnpm, Turborepo
Hosting	Amazon S3
CDN	Amazon CloudFront
DNS & TLS	Route 53, AWS Certificate Manager
Infrastructure	AWS CDK / CloudFormation
CI/CD	GitHub Actions with AWS OIDC

So what did I build? I created a simple static site, waddles.website, where Waddles can continuously surf the web and give you interesting quotes.

Here is what the plane-shipped version looked like running on localhost:

Pretty simple, just an ASCII duck (Waddles) surfing on the DOM, literally.

So that was working locally after several prompts. Now I was ready to ship it to the cloud and ready for the deployment...

I had one pit stop to make, though: a domain name. So I saw .website domains are a good fit for this. At $2/year, you can't beat that.

It's now deployment time, and I already had Agent Toolkit for AWS set up. It was able to help me scaffold out all the CDK code needed to get a static application up.

Then I used aws login to get some credentials to my admin role, bootstrapped my account, and smashed the cdk deploy command only to hit my first hurdle...

Uploading 20 MB ZIPs for my CFN deployment on airplane Wi-Fi was giving me timeouts 😅. So I had to figure something out, and Codex suggested a fantastic workaround. Just push the code to GitHub and let CI/CD be the one to deploy the CloudFormation stack.

Alas, we got the code up to github.com and it finally saw the ✅.