It was a Wednesday afternoon, and the whole city was buzzing with Ganesh Chaturthi vibes. Since it was a holiday, I suddenly found myself with a few free hours. Fresh from the morning’s celebrations, I had that restless energy — the kind that makes you want to tinker and build something.

Normally, spinning up a project like this is full of friction — hours spent setting up servers, wrestling with dependency conflicts, and debugging deployment scripts. But that afternoon, I wasn’t chasing a polished, enterprise-grade setup. I wanted to try something different: vibe coding — coding that feels less like grinding and more like jamming with ideas. So I decided to roll with it and build something simple: a Flask app that captures a few core AI concepts, something fun I could demo or show off later…

Vibe Coding is all about flow. Instead of overthinking setup, I just started writing the Flask app piece by piece, testing as I went along. No long architecture diagrams, no endless planning — just code, run, tweak, repeat.

My Flask app had four main tabs:

• Image Filter – upload an image and apply filters (like grayscale or blur)
• Mean Image – compute the mean of uploaded images
• One-Hot Encoding – try out simple encoding for text data
• Token Count – count tokens (words) in a given input

The code wasn’t fancy, but it worked. And that’s the magic of Vibe Coding — you quickly get something tangible running without over-engineering.

To make it more fun (and challenging), I told myself: “why not deploy it on AWS EC2!”

Now, this is where the story usually takes a turn into frustration — configuring instances, opening ports, messing with security groups. I spun up a free-tier EC2 instance, installed the basics (Python, Flask, and a few libraries), and within minutes, my little AI playground was alive on the cloud.

It wasn’t sleek, it wasn’t production-ready, but it was real. Anyone with the link could open the app in their browser, upload an image, test out filters, and play with text encodings. Watching something I had hacked together in just a few hours run on the cloud felt surprisingly rewarding.

That’s the essence of Vibe Coding: you don’t need a 100-slide architecture deck or a week of planning. Sometimes, all it takes is a free afternoon, a spark of curiosity, and the willingness to jam with code until it clicks.