Last week I ended on a line about rooms you have no reason to enter. Here is what that actually looks like, because the chain of rooms that led to everything I now build started nowhere near design. It all started at baby groups.
I had moved to the UK with a daughter a few months old, and what I wanted for her was other people. So we did the circuit of singing groups and sensory classes and paid subscriptions, and I kept looking around corners for something better. A WhatsApp group I had been added to mentioned a mothers' gathering a few stations away; and it turned out to be a support circle, and it was not for me, but at the bottom of its Eventbrite page sat a recommendation for MOB, Mums Who Built. I found an event with a theme I cared about and went. It was held in a conference room in a company basement, and I remember the feeling precisely: it smelled like my old life.
Then the founder mentioned they were throwing a party to launch their app. End of January. I wore my leather jacket for the first time in a long time, drank one glass of wine, and it was the first evening ever I left my daughter home with her father. I walked into a room full of women who built things.
Priya
At a previous MOB event I met a designer called Priya, who mentioned in passing that she was upskilling in AI on some platform. I did not catch the name. I chased her across three events, to the app launch party, and I got it, which tells you how much I wanted it.
The platform name was Ivee. I took the membership, did the trainings, and learned two words that reorganised my spring: Lovable, and vibe coding. In February I built my own portfolio site across a few late nights, and through an Ivee Slack thread, I found out Lovable was running a sprint on International Women's Day.
The 8th of March
Sunday, 8 March 2026. My daughter spent the day with her father. I went to the hackathon not to win anything, but because I wanted to see what one was like from the inside. Two things happened.
The first: I talked properly with Claude for the first time, planning an app. I left with an idea I had no time to build that day, and am still building today. It will get its own issue when the time comes.
The second was not on the agenda, and mattered more. I sat between two women who had never vibe-coded: one from HR, one who had recently moved to the UK from the US. I spent the day creating accounts with them and walking them through the interface, explaining what I knew from a portfolio built at 3am and a stack of free trainings. I was maybe three weeks ahead of them. Three weeks, it turned out, was enough to be useful. That is the strange arithmetic of a brand-new field: everyone is so near the beginning that a small head start makes you somebody's guide, and nothing shows you what you actually know like explaining it to someone who started that morning.
What vibe coding actually is
People ask what vibe coding means and expect something technical. Mine is not technical: it is a window opening wide onto a world that was shut.
For fifteen years my plan for self-promotion was a PDF. When Priya said she was building her own site, I was intrigued and a little scared, because some part of me had filed that under not achievable. And then it was February and I owned a domain.
It keeps going. Databases. Connectors. Exporting code to GitHub, a place I had heard developers mention for years the way you hear about a city you think will never visit. A job application asked for my GitHub account, so I opened Lovable one nursery day and exported my projects. I was rejected anyway, but the account exists today, which means the rejection paid for something.
The honest ending
Here is the part I owe you, because this newsletter does not do fairy tales.
That day, Claude made me feel I could do anything, and I walked home on clouds. A few months later I learned that walking on clouds is a feeling, not a skill. The muscle gets built the slow way, in the gap between what the AI produces and what actually ships, and what that cost me is the story of the first proper issue of this newsletter: one page, rebuilt seven times.
This week's move
Find someone three weeks behind you and give them an hour. Create the account with them, explain the interface, answer the question you were asking someone else last month. You do not need to be an expert. You need a small head start and some patience.
And when someone asks what you are learning, tell them properly. Say the thing, name the tool, finish the sentence. The person half-listening beside you might be only one word away from opening a new door.
Alexandra