Lessons from Building FanMeter
Idea originated at 1:45 AM, 21st February. MVP shipped ~27 hours later at 5 AM, 22nd February. And no, I have not touched the code and I don't feel bad about it
At the time of writing this entry, I had 4 hours of sleep in the past ~62 hours. I still feel excited to blog about it.
Now, I know that spending 27 hours to vibe code an application in 2026 is probably too much time. I know this because I did ship another vibe coded app in less than 2 hours. But fanmeter.in is different because it is the first one which I'm proud of. It is an application I'd use myself (I couldn't say that about the other one). It is also one which I know my friends and family like to play, at least enough to share it with their own friends.
Here are some of my learnings from building it:
1. Taste is the differentiator
One of the main reasons why I'm happy with Fan Meter is because of how the UI design turned out. Inspired by Greg Isenberg's podcast with Suraya Shivji, I looked for inspiration on cosmos and generated the design screens using Flux 2 Pro on Weavy AI.
I find that this is a great workflow. The search & similarity algorithm on cosmos is top-notch and that really allows you to choose your theme and get an image model to design UI screens matching that theme. There was a lot of back and forth iteration involved in this process for me as I kept chasing and fine-tuning for that exact look and feel that I was happy with. I will be experimenting a lot more & write a blog post on getting LLMs to create the frontend of your apps as per your taste.