In the past, developing a software product was not an easy thing to do.

People needed to understand programming languages, be familiar with development tools, and know the software development process, including front-end and back-end development, databases, UI design, debugging, and app publishing.

For many people who had ideas but were not familiar with software development, their projects often stopped at the stage of “I have an idea.” It was difficult for them to truly reach the point of “I have built a product.”

But recently, with the rise of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, Codex, and Cursor, I have increasingly felt that the barrier to software development is gradually disappearing.

This does not mean that programming knowledge is no longer important. Rather, it means that ordinary people can now use natural language to describe their product ideas, functional requirements, and desired user experience, and with the help of advanced productivity tools, turn those ideas into real products.

When I first started using Claude Code, I was completely absorbed for an entire week.

During the day, I studied it. At night, I kept thinking about it. Even when I went to bed, my mind was full of ideas. I was so excited that I could not sleep. After staying up all night for three consecutive nights, I finally had to stop and rest.

In the past, I thought software development meant programmers sitting in front of an editor and writing code line by line.

After using Claude Code, I realized that I no longer needed to master every detail of Swift, Python, UI development, and other technical areas before I could start building something. Instead, I needed to clarify the requirements:

What kind of product do I want to build?
Who is it for?
What should the interface look like?
Where does the data come from?
How can the user experience be improved?

These questions are no longer purely technical questions. They are product design questions.

The value of Claude Code is that it can turn natural-language instructions into engineering suggestions. It can directly help users write project files, adjust interfaces, fix bugs, and optimize code structure. This is what many people now call Vibe Coding.

It allows people with product ideas to quickly enter a real state of creation and production.

Of course, AI is not perfect. It can make mistakes, and it may misunderstand your requirements. But compared with the old way of relying entirely on human effort to search for information, write code, and debug problems, the improvement in development efficiency is remarkable.

For individual developers, small teams, and non-professional programmers, this is a very important opportunity.

My first product is simple, but I am very satisfied with it.

Claude Code helped me achieve a breakthrough from zero to one.

I had a personal need to learn English vocabulary. Traditional vocabulary apps usually present words as isolated items, asking users to practice repeatedly, memorize repeatedly, and choose the correct Chinese meaning.

For me, this way of learning felt too dull and repetitive.

I also found it difficult to remember words when they were separated from context. A word only becomes easier to understand when it appears in a meaningful setting: in a sentence, in a story, and within the actions and plot of characters.

That was how I came up with the idea of building a product that combines English stories with vocabulary learning, helping users remember words in sentence context instead of mechanically drilling word lists.

Of course, the development process was not smooth from beginning to end.

From turning an idea into a product structure, to designing the data format, adapting the app for different operating systems and user devices, improving the user experience, and finally submitting it to the App Store, I encountered many problems at every step.

But with the help of AI, I was able to solve these problems one by one and eventually publish the product.

This experience made me even more certain of one thing:

In the future, the most important ability for individual developers will not only be technical skill. It will be the ability to discover market needs, design solutions, and bring products to life.

If you are interested in my first product, you are welcome to download it, try it out, and share your valuable feedback with me.

Fun Story Vocabulary — StoryVocab is now available on the App Store.

Download it here:

Product introduction:

StoryVocab helps users advance their learning through engaging stories and remember English words in sentence context. It supports story-based chapter practice, word pronunciation, mistake review, and learning statistics.

To me, this app is more than just a vocabulary learning tool. It proves something important:

An ordinary person’s ordinary learning need can be described in natural language, gradually turned into a real software product, and eventually brought to the market.

Vibe Coding does not mean software development will disappear. Instead, it means software development will become closer to ordinary people.

AI lowers the barrier to writing code, but it does not lower the importance of product thinking.

If you also have an idea for a software product, you might as well start with a small version.

Think clearly about one user, one use case, and one core feature. Then write your idea in natural language, and let AI help you build the interface, data structure, features, code, tests, and optimizations.

You are welcome to try this approach as well.

If you encounter problems along the way, I would also be happy to discuss and explore them together.