I Tried Vibing an RSS Reader and My Dreams Did Not Come True

The experiment

It has been reported that Simon Willison recently wrote about “vibe coding” a dream presentation app for macOS, and that inspired Jim Nielsen to try the same trick on an RSS reader. He started simple: Feedbin as the backend, a list of unread items, and the fantasy that clicking an item would show it in the site’s original format. Reeder already exists, he admits — dreams, apparently, can be redundant — but the exercise was about the process, not market fit.

Roadblocks and revelations

Nielsen tried a native macOS build first — Xcode, Swift, the whole Apple labyrinth — and it was AI that got him past the blank screen to something that worked. It has been reported that the LLM-produced code delivered a usable prototype the first night, and then gradually broke down as complexity rose: the model faltered moving UI elements, errors multiplied, and Nielsen found himself unable or unwilling to debug. Frustration piled up. Sound familiar? It’s the modern developer’s pantomime: promise, patchwork, and then the cold realization that patience — and a willingness to learn platform specifics — matters.

The pivot and the compromise

Web-first felt safe, but CORS killed the iframe preview dream; cross-site headers don’t play nice with embedding other people’s pages. So he vibed an Electron app to sidestep those restrictions — his first Electron build, again scaffolded by an LLM, but this time something he could read and tweak. The result: a tidy left-list, right-preview interface that “works” but isn’t the perfect, native-feeling dream he wanted. In the end the story is equal parts tinkering and truth: AI can accelerate the jump from zero to something, but it can’t yet shoulder the slog of nuanced, long-term polish. Dreams, it seems, still need grit.

Sources: blog.jim-nielsen.com, Lobsters