The Free Press: Can Vibe Coding Make Me a Better Catholic?, by Will Rahn:
Our Father, who app in heaven.
When I sent my friends Jon and Billy links to a test version of the Catholic mental health app I’ve been working on, they both assumed I’d been hacked. … It all started this past Friday when I read AI expert Dr. Alan D. Thompson’s thoughts on Anthropic’s latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) program, Claude. “I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Thompson wrote, but “this model feels both superhuman and complete.”
Several other viral articles since then have contained similar “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we’re all about to die” observations. I’m no expert in these matters, but like just about everyone not named Sam Altman, I’m worried about the rise of the robots and how it stands to upend all our lives. …
I know these damn robots are coming for my family and me. So that’s why I spent much of my Super Bowl weekend being somewhat productive. I’d heard of “vibe coding”—the process of just describing an app and watching the robots make it. And I figured if it were really all it was cracked up to be, then even I should be able to vibe an app into being.
My idea was an app that would distill Catholicism’s best advice on overcoming anxiety and depression. …
Although I never gave up the franchise entirely, I haven’t been a good Catholic—although I’ve gotten better at it in recent years. In order to be married in a Catholic church, my wife, Alice, and I had to do marriage preparation with a priest for several months. We started going to Mass every Sunday. More than that, though, we started enjoying Mass. We now look forward to going. It is, unironically, the high point of our week—which, come to think of it, it’s probably supposed to be. …
I had no idea how easy it would all be. Claude knows its stuff. … Building with Claude is essentially an act of role-playing; we all get a chance at being Steve Jobs, walking around the room gesticulating while the machine does the heavy lifting. We all get to play conductor now. …
Alice named the app Pax Domini, the Latin phrase for peace of the Lord. I call it a companion for stressed-out Catholics. … It’s not a substitute for real therapy with a real person. It’s not a substitute for anything, in fact. It’s something I spent a weekend making with my wife’s help. Also Claude’s help. You tell Claude to do something and it just does it. When something’s not working, it finds the errors in its own code. I don’t know how to build my own panopticon. But I do think I’ll have a solid baseball app (working name is MetsCope) by Opening Day, assuming these machines won’t have killed us by then.
I’m still worried about AI. In my ideal world, it wouldn’t exist. But for now I’ve found a new hobby. If you want to take a look at what we built, you can find an online version here. Play around with it and leave suggestions in the comments. If I ever decide to turn it into something people can download and use, it will be free of charge. And if you’ve made it this far into the article, you might just be the audience for it.
Give it a look. Have fun with it. It’s later than you think.
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