Vibe Check — Devlog 🍓

well…

there was a pretty big plot twist.

the original plan was to ship Vibe Check as a Chrome extension.

everything was already built around that idea.

popup UI.
chrome APIs.
extension architecture.
the whole thing.

then i found out Google wants a $5 one-time fee just to publish an extension.

and honestly…

i was NOT about to pay $5 just so my little prompt tool could exist on the Chrome Web Store 😭

so…

i scrapped the entire extension idea.

---

which meant i had to redesign…

basically everything.

the whole app was originally designed around a tiny popup window.

now it had to become a full webpage.

different layout.

different navigation.

different spacing.

different interactions.

pretty much every screen got rewritten from scratch.

the funny part is that none of the actual features changed.

they just had to be rebuilt in a way that actually made sense on a full website.

---

while rebuilding everything i also decided to add a feature i honestly wish more AI tools had.

Token Saver :3

after Vibe Check analyzes and improves your prompt…

it can now convert the final prompt into Chinese.

before anyone asks…

no, this isn’t some weird translation gimmick 😭

the reason is actually pretty simple.

Chinese is far more information-dense than English, so the same instructions usually require significantly fewer input tokens.

that means:

• lower API costs
• fewer prompt tokens
• more room inside the context window

without changing what the prompt is actually asking.

the AI still understands exactly the same instructions.

if you want the response in English, you can literally just add:

“Respond in English, even though my prompt is written in Chinese.”

and it’ll work exactly the same.

so now Vibe Check doesn’t just make prompts better…

it also tries to make them cheaper to run.

which i thought was a pretty neat addition :3

meow

Vibe Check — Devlog

said last devlog i’d be tackling the UI redesign next. did that. also did about four other things i didn’t plan on. classic me.

two days, and somehow: bug fixes, the redesign, AI integration, a whole landing page, and deployment setup. CSS changes enough to make me question my existence 💔

---

bugs that were silently ruining everything

found out half the buttons in the app weren’t even styled because the css class they used literally didn’t exist 😭

also discovered template search wasn’t searching anything because the input id was missing.

the search bar looked functional.
it was not.
meow.

fixed a bunch of cursed unicode issues too because apparently some checkmarks had transformed into ancient artifacts from another dimension.

---

the redesign arc 🥀

this one was planned, but it still spiraled way harder than expected.

changed one thing. then another. then suddenly popup.css was over 700 lines.

goodbye neon cyberpunk.
hello warm golds, soft reds, glass panels, crystal backgrounds, rounded corners and way too many blur effects.

the whole thing feels a lot calmer now.
less “rgb gaming keyboard”
more “expensive thing i can’t afford” :3

---

ai brain upgrade

probably the biggest change, and definitely not planned.

vibe check can now use Cerebras gpt-oss-120b for prompt enhancement.

ended up building support for:

• local development
• chrome extension mode
• production deployment

all using the same enhancement pipeline.

if ai dies the app automatically falls back to local enhancement so users don’t get hit with a giant error message.

because nobody likes giant error messages.

---

built a whole landing page because apparently i enjoy suffering

didn’t even plan this one.

but now there’s:

• animated hero section
• glassmorphism everywhere
• feature cards
• demo section
• platform showcase
• responsive layout

and enough floating visual effects to make my gpu slightly concerned.

---

production stuff nobody will notice

added deployment configs.
serverless functions.
environment variables.
request validation.
api key protection.
cors handling.

all the boring stuff that becomes very exciting when it’s missing.

---

stats

files modified: basically yes
popup.css: 730 lines
popup.js: 1300+ lines

new files:

• landing page
• serverless ai endpoint
• deployment config

:3

VibeCheck Devlog #1 🥀

so…

for the last few days i’ve been building something called VibeCheck.

the idea is pretty simple:

you paste a prompt.

VibeCheck tears it apart.

then tells you how to make it better.

that’s it.

but somehow that “simple” idea ended up turning into an entire app 💔

---

the original problem

i kept seeing the same thing over and over.

people would ask an ai for something.

the result would be bad.

then they’d blame the model.

when half the time the real problem was the prompt.

so i thought…

what if there was a tool that could actually analyze prompts and explain what’s wrong with them?

not just give a score.

actually tell you:

• what’s missing
• what’s unclear
• what’s limiting the output
• how to improve it

and that’s basically where VibeCheck started.

---

browser compatibility was a disaster

one thing i realized pretty quickly…

the whole app depended on chrome extension APIs.

which means outside a chrome extension…

everything exploded 💔

so i built a chrome api polyfill layer.

now VibeCheck can run inside an extension and directly in a browser without completely falling apart.

storage works.

runtime messaging works.

browser preview works.

and the app stops screaming at me every time i open it.

---

template collection got out of control

this one got a little ridiculous.

templates went from:

15 → 38

there’s now stuff for:

• ui components
• full applications
• backend systems
• debugging
• ai prompts
• api development

and probably more coming later because apparently i don’t know how to stop adding things.

---

random suffering

also spent way too long fixing bugs that should not have existed.

you know the type:

40 minutes of debugging.

3 line fix.

questioning life choices afterwards.

those.

---

what’s next?

right now i’m focusing on making the scoring system smarter and improving the actual prompt analysis.

the ui is pretty trash so id be working on that too

the architecture isn’t actively trying to kill me anymore

and VibeCheck is slowly becoming the tool i originally wanted to build

we’ll see how long that lasts before i break everything again 🥀