My Markdown Viewer

It really seems like vibe coding small tools isn't that bad, especially if you're not a normal person. I'm clearly not, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. Things like this are engaging and helpful. Apologies, but nope, you cannot have Didot, the program I'm blogging about here, which I vibe coded. It seems unsafe to share and might break another person's computer. You can, with or without vibe coding, find or make your own Didot, I'm sure...

It turns out that right now, it is actually just as easy to make customized tools as everyone claims. Vibe coding does let you spin up little apps and programs quickly, without necessarily touching much code. I'm not necessarily saying that this is a good development for programming as a whole, but it's certainly shocking to me.

I created a little browser-based app of sorts, which I call Didot. It shows a file tree of everything I've written, sitting behind frosted glass over a background that changes every time the page loads. Stars drift over it and twinkle, just because. No login, because it's not waiting on a server somewhere else.

Didot is a reading room, aka a simple, editor-less little markdown viewer. It's a quiet place where my own writing gets to look finished even though it isn't. I can open it from anywhere on my local network. My usual setup is two old monitors angled toward each other, though.

Most frequently, Didot lives in the corner of one, filling up with notes while I reread and reference them as I go. So far it holds notes on artificial intelligence for this site. There's also some old Squid Game fanfiction notes I never finished, but I do plan to share someday. I've got plans to dump the rest of my references for AI research in there eventually.

I had a lot of luck with vibe coding this (using Claude). This isn't something I could've done myself within an afternoon at all, which is precisely the point here. I don't think I could do it with a local model, either, but that's a skill issue on my part, like most things. Obviously, Didot itself works offline forever.

A lot of people would say to just upload things to Google Docs, or who knows where else. Sadly, many modern word processors are now cloud-based too, and annoying. Regular markdown files have, for years, allowed me an escape from that kind of proprietary nonsense.

Vibe coding small trinkets and personal tools has, for me and a couple other people I know, allowed greater escape from the cycle cloud-based computing, weirdly? This is something I think that goes ignored recently. I may be using (here, anyways) a cloud-based LLM, true. The result, though, has helped me avoid things like Google Docs and other cloud viewers.

Either way, the creation of Didot was kind of one-shot. Now that it's finished, I can just type didot to summon it. Inside the folder where I've stashed it, I save a .MD, refresh the browser, and Didot picks it up, displaying it as a (read-only, always) document. This allows me to visualize what I'm writing (usually for the web) much better.

Usually I write everything in VS Code, of all places! That includes the activities of a word processor and saving references for all of this. I started doing this after a run of sketchy behavior from some of the "backpack" note apps I tried such as Bear and Ulysses. The latter lost all my work at one point, and the former just charged too much for a while there.

VS Code does the job fine, and I would often secretly recommend it as a word processor. As long as I can actually view and sort what's in there afterward, things are copacetic. I write all of it in plain, unadulterated markdown regardless of where it's headed.

VS Code provides some very distinctive themes, but most are quite centered around code. As a secondary solution, and for fun, I vibe coded Didot. I do use AI, myself, you see! But only for what I actually want to use it for. You should too, honestly. I support you!

I'm not not not a software developer, so vibe coding my own tools doesn't keep me up at night. At least, not too much, because anything I break is mine alone to fix. I'm not running anything critical on it. I already know a handful of web languages like most people do, and I've got extra human help for the rest, plus a menagerie of local robots for experiments like this one.

Most of that experimenting happened here with Fable. I had help from management too (by which I mean family) but most of the actual build was Fable 5's notorious work. I usually stick to my Qwennie crew, but I wanted to see what this (frankly) fabled critter could do.

I paired some Lisa Frank fanfic skyscape images with a frosted-glass look.

Fable 5 has notoriously broad guardrails, there to stop people from using it to hack or hurt each other. My little markdown reader, obviously, poses no threat to anyone. I figured out why it happened anyway: part of this was sitting on a solid-state drive macOS reports as "external," and that alone seems to have been enough to trip something.

It's a little sad watching a frontier model make that assumption in 2026, but here we are. It's a personal, glow-themed markdown viewer, on drives I'd been granted access to over and over, slowly, pedantically. Either way, I did finish it. Just with Opus, not Fable. No amount of explaining moved the switch back. Who cares.

I'm mostly just a software consumer, but I know vibe coding's prevalence is only growing, and where that goes is anyone's guess. In the meantime, yes, I'll keep experimenting and see where it takes me. Of everything I've built for myself on Glow Central (my name for my MacOS) this is my newest favorite.

I don't doubt it could teach someone something (mistakes??), if they were actually headed toward engineering. As a hobbyist I'm not picking up as much as someone who works with software for real, and I'm probably a little old to start. Too bad.

I'm loving the experience of what's possible anyway. I don't have to promise Didot is safe, because it isn't built to be anything else (or anyone else's). It's read-only. It serves exactly one folder and refuses to wander. It never reaches for the internet at all.

That's the whole case for responsible vibe coding, as far as I'm concerned. This project, like my others, has a blast radius small enough that it doesn't matter if I got something wrong. Despite this article, no, you can't have it. That's rather the point.

I started writing this article a day or so ago. The folder Didot reads from has more in it than essays now. One of the directories has a little bit of a resident, who still thinks it's 2006. That's another post, though. In the meantime, read a bit about how I'm using personae in coding environments.

Give it a few months, or, nay weeks, and Didot will not only be searchable, but I bet I'll be speaking with Didot. I have plans, having seen what's possible already.