Vibecoding a Tribute: Remembering Prince 10 Years Later
10 years ago we lost Prince. April 21, 2016 -> April 21, 2026.
To mark the anniversary, I built a little fan project: an app to pick your 20 most loved Prince songs, build your personal tribute playlist, and share it.
But behind the scenes of this purple-hued passion project, there is a technical story. As I like to pressure-test the tools reshaping our digital society, I previously explored the vibecoding paradigm in a write-up about going from an idea to an app without writing a single line of code. But with this tribute, I wanted to dive back in and evaluate the current skill level of modern vibecoding.
So I "vibecoded" this new tribute application. Rather than getting bogged down in manual syntax, boilerplate, and debugging, I built it, as it is usual now with LLMs, through natural language. I acted as the creative director, guiding AI-Agents through prompts, adjusting the "vibe" of the UI, and iterating on the logic in real-time.
My goal was twofold: to evaluate how these tools have matured since my last experiment, and honestly, just to do some fun work. We spend so much time analyzing tech through a hyper-productive, enterprise lens. Sometimes, we forget that technology is also a canvas. Prince was an artist who constantly pushed the boundaries of his instruments, famously operating as a one-man studio to record entire albums himself. It felt fitting to use the newest instrument in our digital toolkit to honor him.
The main process is very simple: gather Prince songs in a collaborative Youtube playlist, import it and add voting, listening and sharing functionalities. Registered user can also add missing songs to the playlist. The main focus was to have a simple and straigthforward user experience.
The evaluation? Vibecoding continues to represent a profound paradigm shift. It dissolves the friction between a creative spark and a shipped product, allowing creators to focus entirely on the human experience they want to deliver.
But at the end of the day, the tech takes a back seat to the music. This is a project with no affiliation, just love for an incredible artist that soundtracked so many of my live.
The app is live today - I would love to know your Top 20. 💜
Live long and prosper 😉🖖
