A Food Founder Couldn’t Code. AI Helped Him Build an App.

Jonathan Butler owned 105 website domains that were collecting dust. The problem was, he didn’t know how to code them to life.

The 56-year-old entrepreneur is a Brooklyn fixture. He cofounded the food festival Smorgasburg and the resale market Brooklyn Flea. In 2004, he made one of New York’s early blogs, Brownstoner.com.

When he was building Brownstoner, he had help. He was “looking over the shoulder” of an employee programming the site’s back-end, he said. With no coding knowledge, he couldn’t do anything with all those web domains himself.

“It hasn’t really made sense to pay someone else a few thousand dollars to fiddle around with your idea,” he said.

Then Butler began reading about AI. He first used it as a “Google on steroids,” he said, before a friend invited him over and taught him about vibe coding. The lecture was on a Friday; by Monday, he started building.

Butler is one of many new “vibe coders,” or non-technical folks who use AI to build software for their day-to-day. They use platforms like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, instructing an AI agent what to code (rather than coding it themselves).

His first vibe-coded project was a website for his REM cover band. Then, there was a website for tracking vintage tool collections, like how he uses Discogs for his vinyl records.

“I have so many records that, when I go to a record store, I can’t remember,” he said. “I’ve got like a dozen David Bowie albums.”

This is the second story in a new Business Insider series, “Vibe Code Your Life,” about regular, non-techie people using AI tools to solve life’s little problems, like a firefighter making grocery shopping less miserable. Have a story to share? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].

His biggest project, though, is a construction management site. Butler is building himself a home in Germantown, New York, at the top of a 15-acre ridge.

“We’re thinking of it as our forever house,” Butler said. “It’s one story, so we will roll around in our wheelchairs and get carted into the showers.”

Butler expects the build to take 18-24 months. It will require lots of blueprints, contracts, drawings, and photographs. Those all too easily get lost.

“Every time I wanted to see the most recent plans, I was digging through my old emails or having the architect resend it,” Butler said.

He named the app Metalog. It’s not too complicated, he said, comparing it to a combination of Dropbox and iPhoto. His goal was to create a centralized platform for document-sharing with his architect and contractor.

Butler does his best work in Claude, which he pays $200 a month for. (“On the free level of these things, you use it up in a few minutes,” he said.) He started this project in ChatGPT, though, asking for an outline.

“I’m building a house now and realizing how scattered everything is and wondering if there might be an opportunity for me to vibe-code a new product that unified everything but wasn’t too crazy,” he wrote to ChatGPT.

The chatbot told him that there was an opportunity and highlighted the core problems. Then, Butler and ChatGPT went back and forth with spreadsheets and follow-ups until they had a plan.

Butler then uploaded the 79-page conversation to Claude Code and asked the system to review it. He got to prompting, asking for “very explicit instructions” as he went.

After about 25 hours of vibe coding, he’s happy with Metalog. He loaded it up with designs and insurance documents, and handed it over to his architect. He plans to use it for meeting notes from their weekly check-ins, along with labeled progress photos.

Laura Trevino, Butler’s architect and sister-in-law, said that she usually keeps documents organized in her own systems. Then, she’ll email them to clients along the way.

“I have no idea how that information is organized on their end,” Trevino said. “With this, I can see what he’s seeing at the same time.”

One example of a task Butler and Trevino used it for: setting budgets. Contracts often have multiple rounds of pricing, all of which can stack up in your inbox. It’s difficult to know which document is the most recent. In Metalog, it takes Trevino “two minutes” and there’s “no confusion about it.”

Still, there’s always more work to be done, and Butler said that he’ll continue to “noodle” on Metalog for three to four hours a day. That doesn’t feel like a burden, though.

“It’s like being in your wood shop making something,” he said. He felt “so powerless” when he couldn’t build his own websites. Now, he feels empowered.

He wants to share it, too. Butler’s next project: building an AI scraper for architects’ contact information, so he can send Metalog straight to them.