Aurora alert app

I was frustrated about missing the aurora borealis for the second time in less than a year, and I was showing one of my friends what all the hoo hah about claude code was. So we chose an aurora alert app as a subject of analysis for using Claude code with superpowers.

The result is here: https://github.com/jcdcodes/auroraapp

The app itself

It’s a python script that runs in macOS. If you have uv installed you can just clone the git repo and run the code; there’s no compilation or anything. As long as you leave it running in a terminal window somewhere, you’ll have a little circle in the menu bar telling you when the aurora are likely to be worth trying to look at.

Obligatory aside: vibe coding stuff

The phrase vibe coding comes from Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, and describes letting your AI coding assistant just write a bunch of code that you then won’t bother to review or understand, but will probably just test for basic correctness and then call it a day. But you can use these things like a real programmer, with a real software development lifecycle. It’s great! And if you aren’t a programmer anyway then this is pretty much what you do anyway when you ask programmers to write something for you.

The basic approach we used is the one described in ../vibe-coding. We put a buggy version of it together in about an hour of talking with each other and typing prompts, plus a couple of hours of watching Claude Code move along of its own accord. Approving bash commands and so forth.

I also tried to add a feature or two several days later using Claude Code pointed at a local model running on my laptop. That was a slow and frustrating experience because the model was slightly too dumb for this kind of work, and was definitely much slower than just writing the code myself to begin with. This was a super interesting way to spend a few hours: contemplating the magic that’s going just barely right by hobbling it so that it goes just barely wrong.

End of digression.