My first (unintentional) “vibe coding” experience

Jason Kratz

Jason Kratz

— 2 min read
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I’ve been trying out the task app TickTick and I was interested in bringing in my OmniFocus tasks. The settings section of TickTick has an OmniFocus import button and says it needs to be a CSV file. I exported a CSV from OmniFocus, imported it and…nothing.

I turned to Claude and asked about importing because there was no documentation anywhere to be found. Claude went out and built a converter. I didn’t ask for this, it just did it. I uploaded the file using the app it had created and…nothing. There was no download anywhere so I asked Claude about it. It mentioned some security considerations when using the embedded iframe it had used.

It went off and tried something else that it said should fix the problem. I uploaded the file to it’s app again and…still nothing. No download. I told Claude again that it didn’t work. It responded:

The sandbox that artifacts run in is blocking the download entirely — even data URIs. The most reliable fix is to just display the CSV content in a copyable text box so you can paste it into a text editor and save it as a .csv file yourself. 

Claude went off again and made the change. I uploaded the file again but before copying the CSV text it output I asked Claude:

Claude one question...I'm doing this chat right now in Claude Desktop. Would this have worked if I would have been running it in an actual web browser?

Claude answered:

Honestly, probably not even then. The artifact runs inside a sandboxed <iframe> regardless of whether you're in a browser or Desktop, and that sandbox strips the download attribute from anchor tags. So the file would have silently failed in Chrome or Safari too.

The copy-paste approach is the right solution either way.

I then proceeded to try to import the converted file to TickTick and…nothing. The converter still didn’t work.

I keep being told that most programming jobs are at stake yet I ran into several major issues with this simple conversion script:

  1. The first two attempts flat out didn’t work.
  2. The third attempt resulted in a file that didn’t match the TickTick format.
  3. It did two attempts with approaches it said wouldn’t work anyhow.

This is the kind of stuff I routinely run into with AI yet from everything I’m reading I’m told the tools are excellent and about to replace programmers. Really?

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