Saturday Sessions: We're all builders now

Build it up

Author

Kyle Balmer
October 18, 2025

This week I’ve realised just how powerful vibe coding really is.

This is all entirely anecdotal but still (I think!) ultra exciting.

I’ve been building a new tool for myself everyday. I’ve build a parking ticket tool that scans tickets and writes up draft contestation letters, several mini-tools for AI workshops and my own QR code creator.

The QR code tool is instructive. I needed a basic QR code creation tool to make a make a QR for a conference I was doing.

Simple right?

Nope!

All the top “free” QR code tools make you sign up. Bitly, Canva or to some random tool.

Why do you need my email for this? Are QR codes complex to make? NOPE super simple. And they don’t need to be “hosted” in anyway. Once created they are permanent.

So I span up this basic totally free and anonymous QR code tool:

Is it ground breaking? NO! It’s something ultra simple and basic that should be freely and easily available. But isn’t because companies are greedy and gate everything behind email capture.

I posted a vide about making super simple tools like to “free up” the internet again. Now anyone can make these tools. For themselves or to give away freely. No nonsense, no faff.

And I encouraged my audience to make their own and spread them far and wide.

One viewer in particular did - he made TinyTools.

All in Lovable. Including audio and image converters yes please! The number of times I’ve had to upload some stupid webP into a jpeg and run into an email capture. Gross.

These sort of things can now be build in minutes.

WHAT we build isn’t that important. I had lots of people telling me where to get free QR codes. That’s not the point there. The point is that now we, any of us, have the ability to build.

Later in the week I was designing a conference workshop. In it I have a relatively complex exercise:

It takes 10 minutes or so normally to work through. It’s a solid exercise but I thought huh…could I get them the same learning faster? With a tool?

This guided them through the questions but inside of a nicely packaged tool. And then spat out a valuable output at the end. This let me make the learning more valuable and more engaging for the participants - one person actually said to me “wait, so it’s done all the work for me?”. Yup.

And it took me 10 minutes to put together.

At the conference itself I met this lovely young man Fenton Cayless:

Fenton runs CameThru which is a networking tool that puts all the attendees up on screen in a network, bridging the gap between in person and digital networking.

A very cool idea. And after meeting Fenton, seeing his product and marketing materials I assumed he was an engineer with a big team and VC backing.

Nope! (well, not yet - I’m certain VCs will come a knocking soon!). Instead CameThru was created using Replit! Just a great idea brought to life using AI building tools.

Finally (I know I know!) I’ve just got my partner to start building. She kept bombarding me with ideas - to which I kept replying “OK stick it in Lovable then”.

Finally I snapped! Pleasantly, don’t worry! I took one of her ideas, ran it through Claude to make a project plan and fed it into Lovable. Within 15 minutes we had the first version of a business.

This app replaces old arse ASP.net based software that medics in the UK pay several hundred a year for and have been doing so for decades. We just replicated and improved (substantially) in 15 minutes and with ~$2 of Lovable credits.

I could go on (no really I could! I’m boring like that!).

Older businesses are in a lot of trouble from anyone equipped with a vibe coding tool and enough drive. Serious trouble.

Personally? I’m excited. This is such a huge opportunity for anyone who has wanted to start a business and has been blocked by the “tech”. That’s no longer an excuse sorry.

We are all builders now.

I’m thinking to put something together shortly to guide y’all through the first steps of vibe coding. If that sounds interesting reply to this email and tell me what (so far!) has stopped you from trying it out. It’ll help me a lot!

Have a beautiful weekend,

Kyle