The Story
This was my first "vibe coding" experience, and it's still the purest example of why I think AI-assisted building matters.
The situation was simple: I had a bunch of video files backed up in two different places and I needed to know which ones I could safely delete. I could have manually compared the folders. I could have used the terminal. Instead, I described what I needed to Claude, and twenty minutes later I had a working SwiftUI application that showed me exactly which files existed in both locations, which were unique to each, and what I could safely remove.
Twenty minutes. From "I have a problem" to "I have a solution." Not a script I'd run once and forget — an actual application with a UI, drag-and-drop support, and a clear visual diff.
I used it, deleted what I needed to delete, and freed up about 200GB of space. Problem solved.
This is the project I think about when people ask me why a lawyer cares about AI tools. Because the ability to see a need and build a solution — right now, in the moment — changes how you think about problems. It changed how I think about problems. And I believe it can change how the legal profession thinks about problems too.