The Gap Between "I Have an Idea" and "I Made a Thing" Just Closed
A 3-day saga of vibecoding, product thinking I didn't expect to do, and shipping something real.
A few weeks ago I opened my computer and, yet again, it was the previous day's chaos splayed all over my desktop. Five Chrome windows with twenty tabs each.
My usual solution? Close my eyes and bulk-close entire windows. (I know, I know — some of you have immaculate tab management. Good for you.)
Literally this has been a problem since my first job. And with AI taking over everything related to productivity, I figured it would get solved soon enough. Silly me.
For the past year, I've watched vibecoding go from a curiosity to a viable way to build real products and businesses with. As a product person I've had no shortage of ideas of things to build but I just hadn't found the right entry point.
That day I couldn't take it anymore and I opened Claude and typed: "Can you code a Chrome extension?"
I kid you not — a few minutes later I had four files and instructions on how to load it into Chrome.
My reaction: ⚰️
I ran downstairs to find my husband, hollering. "Look at this." "This is amazing." "It's basically done."
It was not basically done.
This is when my product brain fully took over. The AI was grouping by website type — but that's not why I keep tabs open. I keep them open because I'm mid-task and don't want to lose context. Task-based grouping will be the prompt. Hmm, maybe that's not how others want to group. Duh, a custom prompt field. That opened a can of worms.
Then the onboarding, API key management, Figma MCP, unit tests & AI evals, more prompt tweaking, feedback loop…
This was a 3 day saga that spiraled into a lot of product thinking I didn't expect to do, but delightfully happy to.
I know everyone says "prototype first" now but after truly doing it for the first time, I think there's some middle ground. More to come on that.
Honestly still can't believe I shipped this. Hope it inspires someone else to just go build the thing.
Mise is available on the Chrome Web Store. It's currently unlisted until I get some user feedback but you can download it using the link.
