When I returned to my computer five minutes after giving Gemini a lengthy prompt, I had two things: an active app in the preview window, and a message about a bug.

“~The channel is irreparably broken and will be terminated!” Feel bad! But just below that was a button to fix the bug. So weird that I just instructed a computer to build an entire app for me with a single prompt, but it required me to click a button to fix the bug. I did anyway, and at 233 seconds Gemini reported again that it was successful, using words like “interruption” and “race conditions.” I didn’t understand it at all. It was sensational.

This was my second or third attempt at vibecoding an app, depending on if you count the one that I never made it past the preview stage. The project that never fully launched was a web app with one task: to check if a local high-end grocery chain was running its annual Peach-o-Rama event. So far, no peaches. However you count it, the project at hand is more ambitious: an app that will help me master my unruly yard.

When my husband and I moved into our house eight years ago, we didn’t give much thought to yard work. Sure, you mow the lawn and stuff, but don’t the bushes and trees take care of themselves? We neglected the yard until the weeds took over. Clearly there was more to this whole “Yard” business than we bargained for.

We won two battles with the weeds but eventually lost the battle and called a landscaper. His one-time visits let us leave the yard mostly on autopilot for a few years. It worked, but then the bushes started creeping and the bushes started to show signs of trouble. When spring rolled around this year, I was determined to find out what was going on in our yard.

I had a rough idea of ​​where to start, but I needed some help along the way and a way to organize the tasks that needed to be done. Why not make an app for that?

I tried to be as specific as possible with my prompt, which was basically a list of demands: Help me manage a long list of yard maintenance tasks. make recommendations; Take the weather into account; Use photo identification to help diagnose problems with plants. I entered all of this into Google’s AI Studio with the goal of creating an Android app that I could load onto my phone and bring out. You know where plants live. I figured it would take an hour or so and I could spend the rest of the day documenting the condition of my yard and doing whatever the app told me to do.

My account was slightly off. Sure enough, I had the app working in the preview window within minutes. It was organized logically, with a section for organizing different plant zones and an AI “plant doctor” where I could upload photos from my phone. But it had a major problem with the color scheme.

For some reason, Gemini decided on a dark mode for my app with dark purple and brick red accent colors. The text was illegible, but at the same time, it was disgusting. I suggested a white background with light greens, pinks, and blues, and reminded her to consider human readability. It’s a bit more cheerful, and the app returns with an enthusiastic greeting at the top of the home screen: “Welcome back, Gardnier!” Honestly, I love the adventures of “The Gardener”, so I kept it a bit.

I also kept the infrastructure that came with the Gemini. I had a few tweaks, like integrating live weather data instead of some of the weird weather presets that come with the AI. Apparently Gemini thought I could just pick the right “profile” to match the weather conditions of the day and it would adjust the watering recommendations accordingly. It seemed like an odd choice when live weather information is easy enough to call through an API, and it wasn’t the last time I had to remind Gemini of the difference between the physical world and a theoretical one. Otherwise, I got it to my phone and started using it as quickly as I could, too excited to ship my first app to worry about repetition.

Except when I looked at the app on my laptop screen, I missed a few important things. I couldn’t edit work tasks after they were created, or schedule them for specific days. I could create profiles for individual plants and group them by zone, but couldn’t associate them with specific tasks or… do much with them, really. There were separate tabs for one-off and recurring tasks, but every task I added to the app seemed to ignore this sorting and ended up on the recurring tab.

This turned into a very tedious back and forth. I requested the update, waited for Gemini to process it, deleted the old version of the app on my phone, and replaced it with the new version. I’ll notice something else isn’t working, like a date picker that doesn’t actually let you pick a date, and then has to go back to the chatbot. Instead of just an unruly yard, I now had an unruly app to take care of, too. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure.

On the other hand, AI Plant Doctor was very effective outside the box. It’s basically just a “Hey Gemini, find out what’s wrong with this plant” button, and I uploaded a picture of a sick rhododendron. A minute or so later it spit out a detailed report card on the health of the plant (critically poor!), possible contributing factors to the problem, and some action items I could add to my planner with one tap. He That was exactly the kind of yard help I needed.

Our landscaper’s set-it-and-fortify-it fix was to cover the flower beds with landscape fabric and river rock. He claimed that this would take care of the weed problem for a long time and the existing plants would recover. Also, he offered a discount if we paid in cash. Done and done.

Now, years later, something was clearly off. A bush near our front door had yellowed leaves and flies were constantly buzzing around it. The rose bushes were gangly and the flowers were few and far between.

Gemini was quick to blame the fabric and rocks suggested by the landscaper. He said it was suffocating the root system, which was also drying out because the landscape fabric had likely been filled with dirt over the years. On top of that, the sun-baked rocks were essentially cooking the roots from above on hot days. No wonder our yard looked like a mess. It was actually a wonder that any of it was alive.

By then, it was too late to begin Operation: Rhododendron Rescue. After toggling my app back and forth, I managed to waste an entire afternoon of fair weather typing hints in the chat window. Every time I hit enter and sent Gemini on a fresh coding mission, I’m sure I was chewing up the equivalent of a microwave dinner’s worth of electricity in a data center outside of Spokane or somewhere. The irony was not lost on me.

Even though my app wasn’t perfect yet, I put my feature requests aside the next day and decided to just follow Dr. Gemini’s quick recommendations for rhododendrons. I spent a sweaty afternoon with podcasts in my ears, moving back river rock and cutting landscape fabric, as well as pruning some bushy bits. Next, I turned my attention to another rock bed, this one covered with weeds that were beginning to grow. At the top of clothes. Hot tip: Don’t put a bunch of landscape fabric in your yard.

It was tiring work in full sun, and once I got close to the thorny Himalayan blackberry vines invading the yard, the traitors started flying. But here’s a secret to yard work I didn’t know eight years ago: It’s extremely satisfying. That feeling when you get your tool under a big weed and pull the whole thing up, roots and all? Or when you take your shovel under a blackberry bush and rip it out of the ground and send it back to Hell? There is nothing like that. Weeding is useless, but it’s also addictive. Once I’m gone I always have an easier time convincing myself to just stay out for another 20 minutes when I really should be packing.

I finally called it a day, opened my app, and did some yard work I had finished. After spending literally hours weeding my yard, I had a new list of feature requests in my head. I wanted ongoing support from Gemini as I worked on revitalizing my plants, not just a one-time diagnosis. And as much as the idea of ​​organizing your yard by zones appeals to my Type A nature, I’m not sure it’s of any use to me. I’m tending to a small urban suburban backyard, not, like, Central Park. Could this app just be a to-do list in Gemini Chat and Google Keep? Maybe

I don’t think my “gardening” app will ever make it to the Play Store, but it’s been quite a lesson to make. It’s hard to tell that a computer is watching your text prompt turn into a functional piece of software—it’s a “telling someone about your dream” situation. But you need to go in with a clear vision for the problem you want your app to solve. I could have saved myself a lot of back and forth if I had done a little more to focus on my needs before I started firing off the pointers.

My adventure in vibecoding also illustrated something I logically knew, but didn’t fully understand: AI has no idea what the real world is. He didn’t hesitate to put black text on a dark purple background, since legibility isn’t a concern for computers. He tried to get me interested in general information rather than real-time weather information, because what is real-time weather for a computer? Even when I get my “Is it Patch-O-Rama yet?” was working on app, Gemini tried to pass a version that would do this. show off to check the grocery store’s website and social channels, but will really just refer to the date of the day with the fact that Patch-O-Rama usually starts in mid-July. I had to insist that it mattered, actually, that Peach-O-Rama was really happening.

I haven’t given up on the Yard app yet, but the right version is probably simpler than the one I started with. And as for the advice I got from Gemini, it seems the AI ​​was spot on. It’s only been a few days since I pulled the rocks and fabric from the rhododendron, but I can already see some new leaves on one branch. Maybe my yard has some life left.