I took the plunge, generated some code, and tracked through what I would consider an iterative indie-adjacent software development cycle so that I could document the effort. I vibe coded for you.

Step Two: Web Paranoia

I had a very simple running platform. I could login using a password Claude AI^[1]  had had-coded into a configuration file. My first push for simplicity forced me to temporarily abandon the notion of a robust user account system. Perhaps rightly so, Claude was reluctant to build such a thing from scratch. It wanted to use a library, and it protested over and over with sycophantic suggestions that my ideas were fine but anything it could build would not match the security and completeness of a downloaded library.

I do agree. 

But that wasn’t the point.

I wanted to build something from scratch. 

Call me stubborn as politely as you want, Claude, we’re going down this road.

“Fear is the mind-killer.” wrote Herbert^[2] in his novel Dune.  

Fear is also the source of tepid approaches to exploration and invention.

I hesitate to anthropomorphize Claude in such as way to suggest fear, but trudging the AI beast through the baked-in paranoia of the web it was exhibiting was not a trivial next task.

The web is a shit-hole of course. Millions of people are trying to build something and millions more are simultaneously trying to break it all down, crack through locks, and steal whatever they can. Claude is not wrong to be paranoid, but damn if it isn’t a quagmire through which to push a new web app project I insisted on building from scratch.

And certainly I could have pushed further, but in the name of security the AI would not let me create a system with anything but the tiniest of holes. And I suppose that is something positive, begrudged as I may be to admit it was right: security by obscurity is not a solution. It added login throttling, hashed multi-factor logins, decoupled password resets, and a list of obvious other suggestions to harden a login for what is currently a single-user system.

If I ever get locked out, I’ll have Claude to thank.

Now look, I’m not advocating to shirk the paranoia of these systems. It is ultimately that in this cold war of escalation we let these systems grab onto that fear and steer us towards more secure systems: but it was a disconnect from the wild west days of my own early development when I often chose to secure fresh code by simply hiding it in a funky-named directory and worrying about encrypted logins later.

Had I been as paranoid back then as Claude is now, I probably would never have made it past “Hello World.”