A Block Product Designer Spent 2 Months Vibe Coding a Dog ID App. Her Top Tip: Sometimes AI Needs to Be 'babied.'

A Block product designer spent 2 months vibe coding a dog ID app. Her top tip: Sometimes AI needs to be 'babied.'

Cynthia Chen built Dog-e-dex from scratch through vibe-coding.Cynthia ChenWhat started as a fun idea to collect dog photos turned into a full-fledged iOS app.A product designer with no formal engineering training built it from scratch through vibe-coding.Cynthia Chen shares with BI her process and takeaways from building Dog-e-dex.When Block product designer Cynthia Chen first dreamed up the idea of an app that could catalogue dogs spotted in th…

A Block product designer spent 2 months vibe coding a dog ID app. Her top tip: Sometimes AI needs to be ‘babied.’

Cynthia Chen built Dog-e-dex from scratch through vibe-coding. Cynthia Chen When Block product designer Cynthia Chen first dreamed up the idea of an app that could catalogue dogs spotted in the wild, she shelved it. “The hurdle was so big, so I never did anything,” she said. For five years, the dream sat untouched. Today, it’s live on the App Store. Dog-e-dex — a playful name inspired by Pokédex (not DOGE) — lets users snap a picture of a dog, i…