what about the data? is it locally hosted? if he drops his phone everything will be lost? or are servers and databases involved? if so, where are they being hosted? how did he manage those?

even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.

I was just talking to a friend of mine who has been making webapps for himself in a similar fashion. Very little to no programming experience. His first app scans his course notes (med school) and creates structured question banks. He's released it so everyone at his school can sign up with their institutional email. The front end is hosted with vercel and the backend with supabase.

He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.

Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.

I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.

If someone has any curiosity, they can ask the AI about this and it will engineer a solution, like use iCloud or some free tier service.

After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.

The stack is typically some combination of supabase and vercel (think: managed everything), which get you far enough on a free plan if you have 1 user

I was writing a comment about the durability of this app, but you beat me to it. Something tells me that the burden of maintaining this thing through various OS updates, security policy changes (from Apple and Google), new devices, etc. is going to be frustrating for him. It's great that he vibecoded something useful to him in this moment, but I do think these stories are "counting their chickens before they hatch" so to speak.