If I don’t write something down, it will be gone from my brain forever. I am the kind of person who needs every date, name, and random bit of trivia noted down, or it will vanish into the abyss.
This has resulted in me trying just about every reminder or notes app under the sun. And it's been a pretty hit-and-miss experience. While I've been able to make things work with these off-the-shelf apps, it’s still not the exact thing I want.
So, when I saw how advanced Anthropic’s Claude has become for coding, I thought I’d try something that would have seemed impossible just a year ago: creating my own app entirely via a chatbot.
Getting started
Making an app with an AI chatbot normally requires some knowledge of prompting. It’s not quite as simple as saying “make me this app”. Instead, you need to give some clear instructions and be prepared for some back and forth.
Claude makes this step slightly easier, offering a pre-designed prompt to best get the model working. I used this prompt, with an edit to make it better fit what I was looking for:
Hi Claude! Could you design a notes and reminder app that allows for both brain dumping and important notes? If you need more information from me, ask me 1-2 key questions right away. If you think I should upload any documents that would help you do a better job, let me know. You can use the tools you have access to — like Google Drive, web search, etc. — if they’ll help you better accomplish this task. Do not use analysis tool. Please keep your responses friendly, brief, and conversational.
Please execute the task as soon as you can - an artifact would be great if it makes sense. If using an artifact, consider what kind of artifact (interactive, visual, checklist, etc.) might be most helpful for this specific task. Thanks for your help!
Claude instantly jumped into coding, but also asked me two questions:
1: How do you want to distinguish between brain dumps and important notes
2: What’s most important in a reminder? Due dates, reminders, or more advanced features
With these two questions answered, Claude jumped into action.
The result
After just a minute or two of generating, Claude returned a completed app. It had a search function and three categories to add notes: Brain dump, important notes, and reminders. While it had everything I asked for, I decided I wanted these in separate tabs.
After asking for the change, it took Claude a few more minutes to do this and my app was completed. I could search for specific notes and had my three categories, capable of adding as many notes as I needed to each.
Each note has the date of creation and with the reminders section, I could choose the exact time a reminder was set for.
With the app finished, I could then publish it. This gives it a public URL and allows you to come back to it at any time. I can bookmark it, and access it via browser from any of my devices.
Overall thoughts
I’ve tried "vibe coding", the concept of coding via an AI chatbot, with all the big names now: ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude.
Claude is, by a long way, the best experience of this. It was so easy getting this app up and running. I was able to decide exactly what I wanted from it and didn’t need any coding experience to do it.
While there is still a long way to go, and this is just a URL I can use to get to this reminders app, it shows the impressive jump forward AI is taking when it comes to coding. I'm already trying to decide what my next app should be.
More from Tom's Guide
- Claude 4 is one of the best chatbots yet — here's the only prompt you'll ever need for it
- I keep turning to this ChatGPT alternative — and 5 prompts that show why
- OpenAI is delaying its next model — but promises something amazing
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