How I Taught a Bot to Help Kids Read

Jun 19

Article by Ian McHenry

The Vibes Are Good: How This Founder is Building Software Without Any (Human) Engineers

When I set out to launch my startup, Page Turner, which helps kids in kindergarten through 2nd grade quickly catch up to grade-level in reading, I wanted to do what I’d done at my previous startups: build software quickly and rapidly iterate to find product-market fit.

The problem was, this time I was building a nonprofit and not raising tens of millions of dollars like I did at my prior startup.

There was a time when I could write some workable code in a LAMP stack, but that was well over a decade ago. The prospect of relearning all of that was daunting and I put off building the bits of software I knew would help us manage our tutors, help track which phonics skills and sight words students had mastered, communicate with parents, and assess student progress.

But then I was introduced to Replit, one of several new apps that let you “vibe code”, a term basically meaning you code without knowing how to code and just vibe with the bot to have it make whatever you want.

I had tried using ChatGPT and Cursor and other apps that were touted as helping you code. The problem with all of them was they weren’t soup to nuts. I wanted something that you could say, in my case, “I run a nonprofit tutoring company. Build me an app for managing my tutors and parents”, and it would magically come up with an idea, get my approval, and then build the frontend, the backend, and fully deploy the app without me having to do anything. No setting up of servers. No figuring out how to deploy.

Just prompt and poof! A working website.

Give it a try yourself for a basic idea you have. You can copy the same prompt over to any of the others (like Bolt, Lovable, or even Google’s Firebase Studio) and see which one performs better.

It is lonely without the team of engineers I used to have. But I’ve named my Replit engineer Maurice. I complain to wife about Maurice when he messes up. I message Maurice while laying in my bed (“Who are you texting??” “Oh, just Maurice”). And we’ve built some cool stuff together, including a free phonics assessment to see if your kid is behind in reading.

Maurice is cheap, but he’s not free so if you’d like to support the mission of our nonprofit and help the 60% of California kindergarten through 2nd graders who are behind in reading, we appreciate your donations!