Vibe Coding a Website on my Phone Waiting at the Barbershop

Is it possible to "vibe code" a website from my phone while waiting for my turn at the barbershop? The answer as you might guess is yes! I recently created an event countdown website completely from my phone (no Wi-Fi) and got it launched in the 45 minutes while I waited for my turn in the chair!

I've been wanting to create an "event countdown" style website for an upcoming wedding and picked it as a good simple target to see if everything could be done from the phone. While this is not ground-breaking, several components are involved, including GitHub Pages for hosting, my domain provider for the domain name, GitHub Copilot for the code repository and AI help. Also my current barber does not take appointments, so on a recent Friday I was 3rd in line, so I had about 45 minutes to crank this out.

The plan worked!

Now, how did we get here? This is everything I used:

• GitHub Mobile This is actually quite powerful especially for the most common tasks including managing issues, pull requests, and code changes. I did need to log in to github.com for a couple things.
• ChatGPT Mobile Worked great, no notes!
• Unsplash I'm pretty sure they have a mobile app but I just used the website.
• DNS provider No mobile app, but the website worked well enough.

Here is the rough sequence of steps I went through, including just the most interesting bits:

First I registered the domain name with my existing provider. Then in GitHub mobile I create the project repo with the initial commit and CNAME file. I started here just to make sure the new domain name had time to percolate across the internet a bit.

Next to the key step where AI was helpful: using ChatCPT with a single prompt to create the countdown website (just a single HTML file):

This was the text of the prompt:

How to create a fun event countdown web site with a big months, day, hour, minute, second countdown floating on top of a background image that rotates periodically?

(Writing this post now, I notice I started with "How to create..." rather than a more imperative like "Create...". That's probably a nuance that doesn't matter; ChatGPT answered my question by doing the thing anyways.)

I brought that index.html file into the GitHub app, adjusted the event title and date/time, and added a few Lake Tahoe image links from Unsplash. I also had to adjust to make sure the event and countdown were in Pacific time, and ChatGPT helped with me a code snippet for that.

Next I found a couple photos from my phone I wanted to include. I tried Copilot inside GitHub mobile and it worked very well; it created a pull request which I reviewed and merged.

The final step was turning on GitHub Pages for this domain and making sure everything worked. (This was the trickiest part of this whole experiment.) For most of this I had to log in to github.com because these settings aren't available in the mobile app. After a few rounds of custom DNS and GitHub settings, it worked! Even the custom domain SSL support worked after a short time.

So in the end, can you create a website while waiting for your barber? Yes of course.