Kid Quotes web app

2025-11-15

I have fallen in love with vibe coding. For years I've had a handful of little side project web applications I've wanted to build but wasn't sure when I'd make time to make them real. Then, I found Cursor and it all changed. Cursor is the AI development app that has worked best for me. It's a code editor (unlike Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex) and it's more focused and precise than the "just describe it and we'll build it" vibe coder apps like v0, Bolt, Loveable, etc. All of them have their place, but Cursor fits my needs just right.

A web app I've wanted to create for years is an app that shows a random quote or story about my kid. She's precocious and funny in her own way and ever since she came home I've been collecting little memories into my journaling app, Everlog. Most recently, they've been funny quotes that she either misunderstands, half understands, or shockingly understands. Everlog exports entries to JSON which I knew could serve as the backend, but I put off building the site for years. I knew it would be fun and would bring me joy, but who has the time?

That all changed a couple of months ago. I've been testing out vibe coding apps and I gave myself a challenge to ship something I vibe coded every month for the next few months. First up was building the kid quotes site, and shockingly, Cursor one-shotted building the core parts of the site. I could not believe it had correctly written huge parts of parsing the JSON and even went further than the plan I'd built. It ended up writing Javascript to do the date math to get my daughter's age at the time of the quote. I'd specifically left that out of the plan because I didn't want to stuff too much into the initial building plan. The app decided it could handle it just fine.

I spent a night designing the layout in Figma and used Figma's MCP server to build a first draft of the site in code. The flow of going from Figma directly into Cursor feels like a development cheat code.

Some of my favorite quotes from my daughter:

• “I know the playroom like the back of my head.” (5 years old)
• (sees it's rainy outside) “It was supposed to be sunny today. I checked my wapp” (3 years old)
• “Time goes by so quickly. It seems like yesterday I was graduating from kindergarten.” (6 years old)
• “This page is stunning. I drawed it myself.” (5 years old)
• “My eyes don’t want to be awake, but the rest of me wants to be awake.” (4 years old)
• "I love funonions. They're my favorite thing on planet Earth." (6 years old)

Having this site brings me and my family so much joy. Each of us occasionally load the site and remember little momemts long past. It makes me so thankful for those moments, and reminds me to appreciate the ones happening right now.

My kid's quotes and memories feel too personal to share publicly so I cloned the site I built and anonymized it with fake quotes so I can share. I've linked the Github repository if you're interested in seeing the code.