GoYou, a Vacation, and the Week I Vibe-Coded My First Real App

We were in Cabo for my boyfriend's birthday. A few days at Solaz, the kind of resort where the day dissolves into pool time, long meals, and losing track of what hour it is. I had no plan to build anything. The whole point was leisure.

Then sometime mid-trip, in the soft window before the pool filled up, I opened Cursor on the patio and didn't really stop.

I had been carrying GoYou in my head for a long time. An AI-assisted goal-setting and life-planning platform. The idea I kept coming back to was simple. Most productivity tools assume you already have the discipline. GoYou starts earlier than that. It is for the people who want to begin before they are ready, and would rather not do it alone.

What I did not have was a version I could show without apologizing for it.

That changed at Solaz. Not because I suddenly became an engineer, but because vibe coding finally made the gap between intent and interface small enough to cross on a vacation, between pool sessions, while my partner napped.

What I actually did on holiday

It was not a hackathon montage. It was found windows. An hour before breakfast. A stretch in the afternoon when the sun got too direct and we moved inside. The quiet pre-dinner gap. Cursor open. A narrow prompt. Ugly first screens that were good enough to react to. Constant reframing. What would a tired person need here? Evening notes on what broke, what confused me, what felt true.

The bigger surprise was not what I built. It was what I let myself attempt. Somewhere mid-trip I asked Cursor about adding live streaming to GoYou. A feature I had quietly assumed was a real-engineer problem, not mine. It walked me through it. Working prototype, sketched out between coffee and the pool, on a vacation that was supposed to be about doing nothing.

That was the moment the trip turned. I stopped asking can I build this and started asking should I.

By the end of the break I had something I hesitate to over-sell and will not under-state either. My first app, end-to-end, mine. Auth-shaped flows. Layout. Logic I could explain. A path forward that did not depend on a dev shop.

What vibe coding changed

Traditional builds always died in translation. I could write the brief. I could draw the wireframe. Then I waited.

Vibe coding let me stay in the loop:

• describe the screen
• see the screen
• correct the screen
• ship the next slice

The feedback cycle compressed from weeks to hours. That is not a small detail when you are learning whether an idea deserves more years of your life.

What I learned as a marketing leader, not a developer

Clarity is a technical requirement. Vague prompts produce vague software. The product thinking had to be tight before the tooling mattered. Every fuzzy sentence in my head became a fuzzy screen on the laptop.

Taste still wins. AI accelerates execution. It does not remove the need for judgment about what should exist. The pieces I'm proudest of in GoYou are the ones I cut.

Momentum is a feature. The biggest risk was not bad code. It was stopping when the UI looked good enough for now.

GoYou is still in progress. This is not a launch announcement. It is a marker: I crossed from talking about a product to living inside one.

More on the mechanics of vibe coding in the next piece.