vibe coding – le0nidas

Making a podcast from the articles

Podcasts are the other source of learning things and keeping up with the latest trends. The fact that I can listen to them on idle time (commuting, chores) is why I keep on using them constantly.

A great feature that NotebookLM has is the creation of an audio file based on the resources you’ve provided. The fun part is that the audio is not a dry read through the gist of the resources. It is a rich dialogue between two characters much like a conversation in a regular podcast.

So one day I thought of combining the two and create a podcast from all the articles that I want to read but don’t have the time to. The result was good. Especially if I didn’t mix and match articles from different newsletters. What I didn’t like was the process. Each article had to be opened in its own tab since most newsletters don’t provide the direct link, then I had to copy the link, go to the notebook’s tab, paste it and repeat the steps for the next one.

What I wanted was to be able to right click on the newsletter’s link, save it to a list and when I’m done collecting links go to notebooklm and create a notebook from them.

Links in Bucket

I knew that this can be done through a chrome extension but I’ve never written one. Actually I’ve never written anything web related. In the past that would be the end of story. Nowadays, a couple of prompts and half an hour are all you need!

So, this is the initial prompt. It contains a quick summary of my need, a description of how I have imagine it work and the way it will used. Since I haven’t worked in this space before, I also asked the LLM to justify its decisions so that I will also learn a thing or two!

I am subscribed in various programming-related newsletter but I don’t have the time to read them all anymore. What I do have is a lot of commute time and a preferance into listening to podcasts.

So the use case is:
i want to manually open a newsletter, pick the articles that i want to read and for them save their link in a “bucket”. When ready I want to be able to dump that “bucket” of links in notebookllm and ask it to create a podcast for me.

In more details:
we need to create an extension for chrome-based browsers that provides two things:
(1) when the user does a right click on a link the extension provides a “save to bucket” option that saves the link in a local storage. some times the link might not lead directly to the article because of attribution systems etc. the extension must save the final link that opens the article.
(2) when the user does a right click on a text field it provides a “dump from bucket” option that fills the text field with the saved links, separated by a newline, and empties the bucket.

The extension is not intended to be upload to any store, i will be installing it from the file system.

Critical note: i am a seassoned software engineer but i’ve never build anything with javascript/typescript/bun. If possible use these technologies and provide detailed explanations of all the decisions in order to get familiarized with them.

After using the first outcome I quickly realized that I need to be able to remove links before dumping them:

we need to provide to the user the ability to remove links from her bucket. perhaps a list with all links and a small x or trash bin next to the link. if the number of the links is greater or equal to two then we need to provide a way to remove all them

If you want to take a look at the result you can find it here: https://github.com/le0nidas/links-in-bucket.
I’ve also included the plans that were created by the two prompts since they include the explanations that I’ve mentioned.

There are three reasons I wanted to write this blog post:

Just because I’m still exited! Exited about writing a tool in an afternoon. Exited about the way I did it and the flow I was in.
Because I wanted to talk about beads.
Because I wanted to mention n.

A tool in an afternoon

The idea of a command line tool that will fit my needs was planted quite a while a go. Couldn’t find the time or didn’t have the energy to act on it so it remained just that, an idea.

Until yesterday that I saw this video. At some point, beads gets mentioned. I was curious as to what it does exactly that decided that it was now or never:
I created a repo, added beads to it, bought some credits in warp.dev and vibe coded the tool I had in mind!

This was the initial prompt:

	I am an engineering manager and I want to create a terminal tool, named n, that will allow me to take quick notes about my reports.

	The idea is that whenever I want to note something down about one of my reports I will open a terminal and write: n <reports name> <my note>.

	The notes must be organized in markdown files named after the report name. For example if I write "n leonidas a simple note" the tool must create a file named "leonidas.md".
	The note must be added to the file under a header with the current datetime in the format YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss.
	For example:
	"n leonidas one note" and "n leonidas another note" will result in:
	## 2026/01/03 14:16:03
	one note

	## 2026/01/03 18:20:00
	another note

	The tool must be configurable. It will read its configuration from "~/.n/config". Its first configurable setting is the folder where it saves the markdown files. By default it saves them in "~/.n/db/".
	The first the user runs the tool it checks if config exists and if not it creates it alongside the db folder.

	I don't know which technology to use so I want you to help me decide and then create a plan for implementing the tool using the selected technology.

view raw n-initial-prompt.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Warp provided a few options with their pros and cons. I chose Go and asked it to provide an initial plan. It did, I accepted it and after a couple of minutes I had a first version of my tool.

Watching the tool working was a pivotal moment. The “features gate” opened and all those ideas just poured out. Here is where beads saved the day.

Beads

The description in its repo is

A memory upgrade for your coding agent

The idea is to provide to your coding agent a way to create tasks keeping its context window small and its concentration at the task at hand. The initial setup is provided by the tool and leverages conventions like AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc

I guess I didn’t push the agent enough to make it create tasks on its own but the fact that I had a tool to save all those ideas and then prompt the agent to “Lets work on the next task” put me in a great flow:

I was asking the agent to work on the next task
While it was working I was playing around with n and adding tasks to beads with either bugs or new features
Go to step 1

That cycle kept me going for a couple of hours!

A simple command-line tool for taking quick notes about your reports.

I’ve always been a terminal guy. Seeing how coding agents increased even more the time I spent to it made me realize that the way I keep notes about my reports must migrate to the terminal too.

The idea is simple. Every time I want to note something down I write:

n name note

this creates a folder name and in that folder a file with the current date which contains the note.

The tool provides a way to tag, edit and delete notes. It provides a way to backup your notes using github and a few ways to see your notes about a report.

Its not much and I know there are better tools out there but this one is exactly as I want it and was implemented in an afternoon!

PS1: I vibe coded it which means that I did not see at the code at all. Don’t judge it 😛 !
PS2: The idea of having all notes in files is to provide them later on in an LLM and have a conversation to figure out the report’s growth.

Tag: vibe coding

Links in Bucket: the chrome-extension that I wrote without writing any code