Thanks to vibe coding, we now are seeing and building free software. I vibe coded MarkAllDown, or MAD, which is an electron desktop app for markdown editing and viewing. For long I have tried different software of this kind but never kept any: Typora is a pretty good one at price, but still lacks some features that I want; I also remembered MacDown, which is a free markdown editor only targeting MacOS, though I am not sure if it’s evolving.

There was a frontend mania around 2015 to 2018 - also the period when I started to gain exposure to software engineering. People were talking about using NodeJS to build system OS and pretty much everything. Atom, the electron based editor, was a nice try at that time as open source community wanted to surpass Sublime text, which is coded in C and closed-source. Sublime was and has been a wonderful text editor, super efficient with aesthetic; Atom became a fad but luckily later got absorbed into VSCode. By the time I started working in 2019, VSCode gradually became THE editor. Though I do remember for my first week at Zoox I still did quite some vim coloring, along with protobuf learning, and I discussed the progress with my manager then. Yeah that was Pre-AI-native.

Electron’s birth was the one of peaks during the frontend mania; for the first time people found cross-platform development so easy. Typora, MacDown, Atom are all enabled by electron. I never thought about coding one such app myself - never a fan of JaveScript and tuning frontend for me often ends up in self-questioning-the-purpose. But it changed 100 percent - it’s like we can finally fry something now and then fried chicken is here. Vibe coding fried the software engineering. (note: fried, not fired, not yet). We used to say that “only refactor when there’s 10 times performance gain” - FALSE now, as the cost of refacotring is so low with LLM. I believe refactoring, or even restarting from scratch, could be the best engineering choice for many existing software engineering organizations now.

Back to MarkAllDown, and skipping all tech details as you can always check Claude’s notes in the repo, what are the features that I want to give it that are not seen in apps like Typora? First is the customization of editing and reviewing functionalities. Second, a good file management for all snippets and docs. Third, in-text learning and scaling by AI. I also started writing now as I feel in this era when code becomes cheap and even free, ideas may not be valuable but worth keeping - we eventually need to tell what belongs to me and what belongs to LLM, conceptually, for the sake of our sanity.