I started this year trying to be a "Content Creator." I ended it realizing that it is far more fun and rewarding using Vibe Coding as my creative outlet.
Back in February this year, I was grinding on TikTok, trying to qualify for the Shop Affiliate program. It was brutal. I spent hours filming, editing, and stressing over content videos that would just… flop, and I had no idea why. No feedback. No data. Then, a video I was actually proud of got hit with a generic TikTok "Violation." No reason given. Just a red flag.
I was angry ... and needed to find answers, that just did not seem to exist.
I had some ancient coding knowledge (from 30 years ago!), an idle web hosting account, and a growing interest in LLM's. I decided to try and build a simple script to find out why my account was dying.
The "Vibe Coding" Trap
I thought "Vibe Coding" meant typing a prompt and watching the magic happen.
I was wrong.
What actually happened was weeks of obsession. I started with a simple idea: ask the LLM to analyse the video. But then I fell down the rabbit hole.
I spent hours and hours and hours coding. Then breaking it. Then researching why it broke. Then recoding it. Then realizing the AI had hallucinated a function that doesn't exist. Then fixing it.
And you know what? I loved every single second of it.
I was battling with Gemini, teaching it my file structure, fighting with context limits, and nearly crying when I accidentally deleted 3 days of work because I was way too trusting of both my own skills honestly did not understand the limitations of my ai counterpart, who, at that point, was just a chat ai, not a dedicated coding tool.
The Obsession
My little script spiralled. I didn't just want a "checker"; I wanted a forensic laboratory.
I taught myself how to use GitHub and Codebase to manage the chaos.
I built a Hub & Spoke architecture for a custom WordPress plugin.
I wrote (and rewrote) complex prompts to force the AI to act like a grumpy data analyst.
A few hundred lines of code turned into 8,000 lines. One file turned into 71 files in a solid folder structure.
I realized that "Vibe Coding" isn't about the AI doing the work for you. It's about the AI giving you the superpowers to build what's in your head, as fast as you can think it. It allowed me to punch 30 years above my weight class.
What I Built
The result of those hundreds of hours, is GrumpyGit's Creator Tools — a suite of AI driven forensic tools that I wish I had when I started as a fledgling TikTok Creator:
Shadowban Checker & Account Health Analyser: (My latest pride and joy) It grabs all of the users account metrics, presents them cleanly and then does a full analysis so that it can present the user with the facts about their account plus give them valuable actionable suggestions on how to fix or push their account to the next level.
Video Analyser: The AI analyses the video to check for potential rule violations, scores its hook and engagement potential, and gives practical, actionable tips to improve it.
Violation Checker: It digs deep into the users video and metadata to find the real reason the video was flagged, and tell the user how to fix it.
Video Downloader: Because I needed a way to strip metadata for my own backend tests, so I built a frontend for it - of course ... lol.
Video Transcriber: Because I had the AI bug and I was curious about the possibility of building a 'standard tool' that could also do extraordinary things ... not just remove the filler words, but also clean up the grammar and sentence structure - because .. why not :-)
But honestly? The tools are just the output. The real outcome is that I found my thing. This - the breaking, the fixing, the learning - is literally all I want to do from now on ... I dream of the day that I can leave my day job behind and JUST do what I so thoroughly enjoy doing.
If you want to see what a "rusty" wannabe dev and an AI can build when they are absolutely obsessed, you can check out my latest pride and joy here:
==> GrumpyGit's Shadowban Checker & Account Health Analyser <==
To anyone else wondering if it's "too late" to get back into coding: It's not. Grab an AI, pick a problem, and get ready to go down many a rabbit hole and lose a lot of sleep (happily).
What tools have you used or recommend? Anyone had a similar AHA moment?
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