{"id":2081,"date":"2026-06-13T21:08:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T21:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2081"},"modified":"2026-06-13T21:08:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T21:08:13","slug":"vibecoding-backyard-app-gardening-organizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2081","title":{"rendered":"My yard is dying, so I made an app for that"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When I returned to my computer five minutes after giving Gemini a lengthy prompt, I had two things: a functional app in a preview window, and a message about a bug.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201c~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed!\u201d Sounded bad! But right below it was a button to fix the bug. Pretty weird that I just instructed a computer to build a whole app for me with a single prompt, but it needed me to click a button to fix a bug. I did anyway, and in 233 seconds Gemini reported back that it had succeeded, using words like \u201cblockages\u201d and \u201crace conditions.\u201d I didn\u2019t understand a bit of it. It was thrilling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was my second or third attempt at vibe-coding an app, depending on if you count one that I never took out of the preview stage. The project that never fully launched was a web app with one job: to check if a local high-end grocery chain is running its annual Peach-o-Rama event. So far, no peaches. However you count it, the project at hand is more ambitious: an app that will help me master my unruly yard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"All<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

All the best yard projects start with a natural language prompt in a chatbot.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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When my husband and I moved into our house eight years ago, we didn\u2019t give a lot of thought to yard work. Sure, you mow the lawn and stuff, but don\u2019t the shrubs and trees pretty much take care of themselves? We ignored the yard until the weeds moved in. The flower beds bordering the house and the boundaries of the yard quickly filled with weeds of biblical proportions. Clearly there was more to this whole \u201cyard\u201d business than we anticipated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We won a couple of battles with the weeds but eventually lost the war and called in a landscaper. His one-time visit let us leave the yard mostly on autopilot for a few years. It worked, but then the weeds started creeping back and the shrubs were showing signs of distress. When the weather started turning spring-ish this year, I resolved to figure out what was going on with our yard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I had a rough idea where to start, but I wanted some help along the way and a method of organizing the chores that needed to be done. Why not make an app for that?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I tried to be as descriptive as possible with my prompt, which was basically a list of demands: Help me manage a long list of yard care chores; Make recommendations; Take weather into consideration; Use image recognition to help diagnose problems with plants. I entered it all into Google\u2019s AI Studio with the goal of creating an Android app that I could load on my phone and bring outside. You know, where the plants live. I figured it would take an hour or so and I could spend the rest of the day documenting the state of my yard and doing whatever the app told me to do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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My calculus was a little off. Sure, I had a working app in a preview window within a few minutes. It was logically organized, with sections to manage different plant zones and an AI \u201cplant doctor\u201d where I could upload images from my phone. But it had a major color scheme problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Why,<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Why, Gemini?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For some reason, Gemini had decided on dark mode for my app, with dark purple and brick red accent colors. The text was illegible, but also, it was hideous. I suggested a white background with light green, pink, and blue colors, and reminded it to care about human readability. It returned with something more pleasing, and an enthusiastic greeting at the top of the app homescreen: \u201cWelcome Back, Gardeneer!\u201d Honestly, I like the adventurous edge of \u201cgardeneer,\u201d so I kept that bit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I kept the basic structure that Gemini had come up with, too. I did have a few tweaks, like integrating live weather data rather than some weird climate presets that the AI had come up with. Apparently Gemini figured I could just pick the right \u201cprofile\u201d to match the day\u2019s weather conditions and it would adjust its watering recommendations accordingly. It seemed like an odd choice when live weather info is easy enough to call in via API, and it wasn\u2019t the last time I\u2019d have to remind Gemini of the difference between the physical world and a theoretical one. Otherwise, I beamed it up to my phone and started using it as quick as I could, too excited about shipping my first app to be bothered with iteration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Except there were some critical things I\u2019d missed when I\u2019d glanced over the app on my laptop screen. I couldn\u2019t edit chores once they\u2019d been created, or schedule them for particular days. I could create profiles for individual plants and group them by zone, but couldn\u2019t tie them to particular tasks or\u2026 do much of anything with them, really. There were separate tabs for one-off and recurring tasks, but every chore I added to the app seemed to disregard this sorting and landed on the recurring tab.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The color scheme isn\u2019t perfect but it\u2019s definitely better.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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This plant doctor feature turned out to be the most useful thing in my app.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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This turned into a lot of tedious back-and-forth. I requested an update, waited for Gemini to implement it, deleted the old version of the app on my phone, and replaced it with the new one. I\u2019d notice something else not working, like a date picker that doesn\u2019t actually let you pick a date, and then have to go back to the chatbot. Rather than just an unruly yard, I now had an unruly app to tend, too. There\u2019s a lesson somewhere in there, I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the other hand, the AI plant doctor was very effective right out of the box. It\u2019s essentially just a \u201cHey Gemini, figure out what\u2019s wrong with this plant\u201d button, and I uploaded a picture of an ailing rhododendron. After a minute or so it spit out a detailed report card on the plant\u2019s health (critically bad!), likely factors contributing to the problem, and some action items I could add to my planner with a tap. That<\/em> was exactly the kind of yard help I needed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Our landscaper\u2019s set-it-and-forget-it fix had been to cover the flower beds with landscape fabric and river rock. This would take care of the weed problem for a long time, he claimed, and the existing plants would be fine. Plus, he offered a discount if we paid in cash. Done and done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now, years later, something was clearly off. The leaves on a bush near our front door turned yellow and flies were constantly buzzing around it. The rose bushes grew gangly and blooms were sparse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

At least it thinks my cherry tree is doing okay.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

One weird trick to fix your yard: don\u2019t cover it in rocks.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Gemini was quick to blame the landscaper-recommended fabric and rocks. It was suffocating the root system, it said, which was also drying out as the landscape fabric had likely become clogged with dirt over the years. On top of that, the sun-baked rocks were essentially cooking the roots from above on hot days. No wonder our yard looked like shit; it was actually a wonder that any of it was still alive at all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At that point, it was too late in the day to begin Operation: Rhododendron Rescue. After all the back-and-forth making my app, I\u2019d managed to squander a full afternoon of nice weather typing prompts into a chat window. Every time I hit enter and sent Gemini on a fresh coding mission, I\u2019m sure I was chewing through the equivalent of a microwave dinner\u2019s worth of electricity at a data center outside of Spokane or wherever. The irony wasn\u2019t lost on me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even though my app still wasn\u2019t perfect, I put aside my feature requests the next day and decided to just act on Dr. Gemini\u2019s urgent recommendations for the rhododendron. I spent a sweaty afternoon with a podcast in my ears, raking back the river rock and cutting back the landscape fabric, as well as pruning some of the twiggier bits of the shrub. After that, I turned my attention to another one of the rock beds, this one covered in weeds that had started growing on top<\/em> of the fabric. Hot tip: Don\u2019t put a bunch of landscape fabric in your yard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here\u2019s the secret of yard work that I didn\u2019t know eight years ago: It\u2019s extremely satisfying<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It was exhausting work in the full sun, and once I got closer to the thorny Himalayan blackberry vines invading the yard, the expletives started flying. But here\u2019s the secret of yard work that I didn\u2019t know eight years ago: It\u2019s extremely satisfying. That feeling when you get your tool under a big weed and pull the whole thing up, roots and all? Or when you get your shovel under the blackberry bush and rip it out of the ground, sending it back to hell? There\u2019s nothing like it. Weeding sucks, but it\u2019s also addictive. Once I get going I always have an easy time convincing myself to just stay out for another 20 minutes when I should really pack it up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I did eventually call it a day, opened my app, and crossed off a couple of the yard chores I\u2019d finished. Having spent several hours literally in the weeds of my yard, I had a new list of feature requests in my head. I wanted ongoing help from Gemini as I worked on reviving my plants, not just a one-time diagnosis. And as much as the idea of organizing my yard by zones appeals to my Type A nature, I\u2019m not sure it does anything useful for me. I\u2019m taking care of a small urban-suburban backyard, not, like, Central Park. Could this app have just been a Gemini chat and a list of to-dos in Google Keep? Probably.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t think my \u201cGardeneering\u201d app is ever going to make it to the Play Store, but making it has been pretty instructive. It\u2019s hard to communicate how wild it is watching a computer turn your text prompt into a functional piece of software \u2014 kind of a \u201ctelling someone about your dream\u201d situation<\/a>. But you do need to go in with a crystal clear vision for the problem you want your app to solve. I could have saved myself a lot of back-and-forth if I\u2019d done a little more work up front to focus on my needs before I started firing off prompts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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My adventure in vibe-coding has also illustrated something that I knew logically, but didn\u2019t fully grasp: AI has no idea what the real world is. It didn\u2019t hesitate to put black text on a dark purple background, because legibility isn\u2019t a concern for a computer. It tried to interest me in generalized rather than real-time weather information, because what even is real-time weather to a computer? Even when I was working on my \u201cIs It Peach-o-Rama Yet?\u201d app, Gemini tried to pass off a version that would pretend<\/em> to check the grocery store\u2019s website and social channels, but would really just cross-reference the day\u2019s date with the fact that Peach-o-Rama usually starts in mid-July. I had to insist that it mattered, actually, whether Peach-o-Rama was really happening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I haven\u2019t given up on the yard app just yet, but the right version is probably much simpler than the one I started with. And as for the advice I got from Gemini, it\u2019s looking like the AI was spot-on. It\u2019s only been a few days since I pulled the rocks and fabric back from the rhododendron, but I can already see some new leaves coming in on one of the branches. Maybe there\u2019s some life left in my yard after all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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