Vibe coding helped me turn a 25-year-old idea into a real thing

TLDR: I made https://filnoise.leenukes.co.uk/

I’m not a developer, but AI has helped me realise ideas that I’ve had in my head for literal decades. Things that are relatively simple, but not something I could ever program. Mostly they were concepts — things that start with the thought: “Wouldn’t it be cool if….”

Right now I’m waiting for my first real app to hit the Android store. I’ve had apps before, but they were just tests, and I’ve had a developer account on Android for over 14 years now.

That’s not what I’m talking about here though. This time, with the help of AI, I was able to realise a simple idea I’d had 25 years ago.

The idea was: “what if you could drag a file onto a script and listen to it?” At the time my thinking was that the script would turn the file into binary or bytes, and those bytes would translate to notes. This didn’t really make sense though, because most files would be so large that the song would last for ages.

So the idea sat there. For a quarter of a century. Ouch, putting it like that makes me realise how old I’m getting.

Then, 25 years later, I’m playing around with vibe coding and the idea came back to me, also helped by hearing about TrainJazz on a podcast, which does something similar with the New York subway system.

A couple of hours of back and forth with AI, working out the specifics, for example I didn’t want to actually have access to people’s files, so it all happens client side and filnoise was born.

Check it out: filnoise.leenukes.co.uk