Micro-niche vibe coding?

tinkering
Written By Phil Johnston
Haystack Rock - Canon Beach, Oregon
“Making the tools to be more productive.”

I’ve been vibing lately with terminal UI (TUI) apps. Small personal tools that help me optimize a very specific task or workflow. I call these "Micro-Niche" tools. I can spin these tools up in an afternoon, where before I would have just kept plodding along without them.

The nn'th project that sparked this

Over the years I continue to start and stop building these small projects that would benefit my life, but eventually give up due to either getting stuck, running out of time or simply getting distracted.

The first one that really has improved my workflow has been a TUI tool that allows me to keep up with a community I manage. Basically we have a website that doesn’t really offer an RSS feed in a way that helps me, so using Cursor and a GraphQL endpoint, I was able to write a little TUI reader application that pulls in the most recent messages, presents them to me, allows me to filter out for keywords and then will generate summaries of the threads.

TUI Reader that helps me in my day job.

If you are interested you can find it here, but that’s not the point of this article. 

Not exactly something you’d find on Hacker News’ front page, but for me it’s a perfect example of a personal workflow enhancement with custom tooling.

Workflow + Quake Visor Mode

I run my app inside iTerm2’s Quake Visor mode with a quick key combo and the TUI drops down like a heads-up display. Read, scan, pop it away. It feels frictionless.

Before? I’d either avoid the task altogether or waste time flipping between tabs and copy/pasting into Notion, Gemini, ChatGPT or a text editor. The overhead sucked and took me forever to manage.

Why this works for me

What I love here is not the specific tool, but the vibe:

  • It’s lightweight.

  • It’s built for me, not a broad audience.

  • It exists because AI made the “too much effort” barrier vanish.

Years ago, I’d have sketched this out and said “cool idea, let’s build it, but I don’t know Python, so let me start there...” Now I can just let AI scaffold it for me, iterate a few times, get something working and start using it immediately. Then I iterate for a few more days and really insert it into my daily workflow.

TUIs are underrated in 2025. With a little AI assist, they’ve become my go-to for building **flow tools**: helpers that don’t try to be polished apps, but instead quietly optimize my workflow.

Do you have some tools you've Vibe-coded to share?

I’m curious, do you have any personal apps have you created to improve your flow? TUIs, scripts, automations, weird one-offs?

Phil Johnston