I Vibe-Coded an App on Maternity Leave. Here’s What It Taught Me

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Laura Zaccaria, a Singapore-based HR professional and new mom who taught herself to build an AI-assisted web app while on six months of maternity leave. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve never studied anything related to coding.

My husband started to dabble with vibe coding. He replicated my not-for-profit yoga organization website and sent me the link. He was like, “See what you can do now in a couple of hours?” I was quite intrigued.

He was going to sign up for a class called Code with AI in June. He asked me, “Why don’t you come with me?”

I suppose what he was trying to do was nudge me into exploring something else. Becoming a mother was a very life-altering experience — suddenly, my baby became the center of my world.

I was very intimidated because I didn’t know anything about coding and how to use ChatGPT. I didn’t even have a personal laptop to install the software needed, so I bought one for this class.

It’s a weekend thing and a few hours from my baby, but we have help at home. So, I went along with him. It’s a capsule of time before going back to work, and in a career, you rarely get that.

Maternity leave became my time to learn and evolve

As a new mom, I started to think about my baby’s weaning — he’s starting to eat solid food. I thought, How are we going to plan all the meals when I go back to work? Maybe I’ll try to build something to tackle that: a family meal planner.

I kept working on it after the course, mostly in the evenings or when the baby was napping. On weekends, my husband would take the baby away for a couple of hours or just play with him so I could keep working on it.

It kept my brain active in a different way. When I went on leave, I unplugged from corporate life and was fully focused on caring for a small human. That uses such a different part of your brain.

Picking up new skills gave me confidence that I can continue to evolve. Being a mom is not my sole identity.

AI is like an over-enthusiastic intern

When I was coding, I mainly used Cursor.

If I got stuck, I’d just ask Cursor, and it would tell me, “Here’s what you can do, here’s where to look.” It wasn’t just building the app — it was also guiding me.

I faced a technical hurdle with sign-ups and confirmation emails. There were limitations to how many emails the database could send and how customizable they were. When my husband, my brother, and friends tried to test the app, we hit those limits fast.

Eventually I had to find another platform to handle verification emails and password resets, then integrate it as another layer on top. It sounds basic, but before building this I never thought twice about how that logic actually works.

Sometimes, you get stuck in a loop. Generative AI can be like a young, over-enthusiastic intern. You need to know when to pause and ask yourself: Where was I not clear? And sometimes it’s OK to scrap the whole conversation and start afresh.

A few times, what Cursor created was not what I wanted. I realized I hadn’t phrased things properly, or I had asked for something too big. Then I’d have to break it down again. That was probably the main skill I picked up, which I now use not just for building an app but for any other generative AI tool.

I don’t want to be a parent or employee who falls behind

What this made me realize is how far the technology has come.

People in tech already know this — I have friends at places like Workday, Salesforce, Google, and Meta, and they’re under a lot of pressure from their employers to pick up these skills because they have to deploy these solutions.

I was astonished by how quickly things were improving, even while I was building my app.

Some things became easier to unlock week by week. It made me want to stay up to speed, because I’m sure that what I learned now will be semi-obsolete in just a couple of months.

Before, if someone said AI is coming for your job, I might have panicked. But once you learn about it, it becomes less daunting.

And with my baby, I know the tools he grows up with will be completely different from what I had, or what my parents had. It emphasized that we need to keep up so that we can understand the world he’ll grow up in.

When I was younger and mobile phones came out, my parents were shocked: What is a smartphone? What do you even do with apps? I hope I won’t be like that. I want to understand what my son is using, how he’s learning, and the world he’ll grow up in.

Do you have a story to share about vibe-coding? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.