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- NewsEdSurge24 Jun 2026
Vibe Coding Sparked a Love of Reading in My Classroom
A primary school teacher used vibe coding—AI-assisted software development—to build a personalized reading recommendation app that increased student engagement with the school library catalog. The tool connects children to books likely to excite them, addressing the problem of curated books sitting untouched on shelves.
Original abstract
<p>I have had big ideas before. Ideas that felt urgent and important at 11 p.m. and somehow evaporated by morning. So, when the idea for creating an AI-powered reading recommendation system to generate student excitement about our school’s library catalog came to me, I asked my partner what she thought about me giving up evenings and weekends for a year or two. “Just go for it,” she said.</p><p>That conversation was in May 2025. By November, my <a href="http://www.libraryaid.net"><u>vibe-coded app</u></a> was live in my classroom.</p><h2>Why I Started Vibe Coding</h2><p>I’m a U.K.-trained primary school teacher with 11 years of experience in international schools across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Over the years, I have seen librarians carefully curate books only to have them sit untouched on library shelves. This is because there was no systematic way to connect each child to the book most likely to excite them.</p><p>Existing solutions were expensive, rigid, and built around proprietary book lists that didn’t match our collection. The more I looked at what was available, the more I realized the problem wasn’t that the technology didn’t exist — it was that nobody had built it for teachers like me, working in schools like mine.</p><p>So, I decided to build one myself, using an AI technique that I had read about with increasing interest: vibe coding.</p><h2><strong>Learning to Build an App</strong></h2><p>Vibe coding is a practice where people use AI tools to generate software code by describing what they want in plain language to the tool, with little to no traditional programming knowledge required. So, I started vibe coding and telling a large language model what I was trying to build. </p><p>Progress was painfully slow — a day forward, three days back. Over the summer months I nearly quit several times. The early architecture decisions haunted me: I was working on a 12-year-old Mac I hadn’t upgraded, and just getting the right development environment inst