91-Year-Old Grandpa’s Vibe Coding Adventure With Claude + Replit

John Blackman, a 91-year-old retired electrical engineer, wanted to make life easier for the people who handled events at his church. He turned to two unlikely companions—Claude and Replit. 

In the tech lanes of the world, when CEOs, founders, and researchers step away from discussions about AI benchmarks and capabilities, they focus on democratisation. They say everyone is a developer, thanks to AI. 

But when it’s a nonagenarian vibe coding an app for his Sunday community church events, you can’t help but be fascinated and appreciate what AI brings to the table for millions today. 

Blackman appeared on the ‘How I AI’ podcast hosted by Claire Vo, CTO of LaunchDarkly, and outlined his journey of using Replit and Anthropic’s Claude to build an app to help the organisers of his church’s community events. 

Giving Back to the Community via Vibe Coding

The app, built for under $350, offers features that enable users to create events, recruit volunteers, and manage sign-ups. 

These events were part of the church’s impact weekends, which were local outreach gatherings where volunteers offered free community services, including haircuts, vision screenings, car washes, free meals, health clinic services, and more. 

This process of using AI to program applications in just natural language prompts was popularly termed as ‘vibe coding’ by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpaty. 

Blackman credits his grandson, Brett, for giving him the idea and for his assistance in building an app. “I handle registration for these events, and so I said it’d be nice to have that in a computer somehow, so he [Brett] said, ‘Well, let’s do it’,” said Blackman. 

Blackman then used Claude to outline everything he wanted inside the app, which generated the user journey and product requirements. He then took over Replit to write code for the app. 

He proposed the concept of an ‘Impact Passport,’ a QR-enabled printed document that lists each attendee’s chosen services during the event. This document guides participants through various stations, where volunteers scan and check off services, automatically recording the data into the event system. 

The app enables church organisers to register attendees, manage multi-tenant events, toggle services, generate reports (including demographics and usage), print badges, and automatically email PDF confirmations.

During the interview, Blackman detailed his complete journey in building the fully functional app, which includes a dashboard and real-time tracking features of registrations and services, with live toasts when they check in. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xDQrJmVcfU&t=2s

Besides, it can automate reports of participant demographics, service-usage counts, shopping lists, vision clinic stats, volunteer badge lists, and more using PDF/Excel formats. 

Blackman’s efforts were to truly build an app and not just an experiment with a couple of fancy AI tools. 

“They couldn’t believe it. They said ‘This blows me away’,” said Blackman about the reactions of the people who were part of the event. He’s not done with the app yet; he continues the app development, fixing bugs, and asking people what other features they want. 

While Blackman does not have experience in programming, his career, spanning over seventy years, encompasses various aspects of technology. 

He started as a blueprint machine operator in 1955, and by 1972, he was a system construction designer. A few years later, he earned his private pilot’s license and also worked as a wiring diagram designer in the avionics sector. 

In the late 80s, he picked up computer-aided design (CAD) worked with AutoCAD and MicroCAD, and continued to work on several infrastructure projects before retiring in 2018. 

One of his projects involved upgrading electrical systems in St Louis through "Power On" projects and designing the attachment of Google Fiber to Kansas City Power & Light’s pole system.

Blackman’s journey is one among many, which shows that traditional barriers such as age, career path, education level, or problem complexity no longer limit who can learn, contribute, or innovate.

Anybody Can Build

A similar story was reported last year in Japan, where an 89-year-old man, named Tomji Suzuki, started coding in retirement. With the help of AI tools like ChatGPT, he improved his skills and started developing apps for the elderly market. 

He was reported to have developed eleven free iPhone apps to help the ageing population in the country. 

On the other end of the spectrum, AIM came across several stories of kids using these platforms to build apps and games that they like.

One user on X said, “My son went to an escape room. When he came back, he wanted to buy the game. I said, let’s build it. And we went cranking. We built this using AI + Replit. It was so much fun.” 

Anton Osika, CEO of Lovable, a popular AI-enabled coding platform, said on X, “Kids might actually be better at using Lovable than adults. Unlimited creativity, no fear.” 

“The future is bright!” he added.