No Kenala Without Vibe Coding.

Whoever uses Kenala sees little of it. You say one sentence, get a preview and approve it. Behind that, many small tools are at work. One finds the place where a text sits, in German and in English. One checks whether the new text keeps to my language rules and whether the facts are right. One takes screenshots, old and new side by side. One is the entrance through which any AI will later be able to hand in jobs. And one makes sure that nothing goes online before a person has said yes.

None of these tools is bought, ready-made software. Each one exists because I described what it should do.

Building through language

This is called vibe coding. I do not sit in front of program code typing line by line. I explain to Claude, an AI by Anthropic, what I need, the way I would explain it to a colleague. Claude writes the code, I look at the result, try it out and say what is not right yet. Then the next round.

It has not turned me into a programmer. I am someone who can say very precisely what he wants and who notices when something does not fit. I learned that in more than twenty-five years as a designer, not at the computer.

Why it would not work without it

Kenala is not an off-the-shelf product. It grew out of my own working life, out of mistakes, detours and what proved itself. If I am missing a tool, I build it. If one creates more work than it saves, I take it down again. That is only possible because building does not take months and does not need a development team.

With bought software I would have had to adapt to it. With vibe coding the tool adapts to the work.

The same principle twice

The nice thing is: whoever uses Kenala does, on a small scale, exactly what I do when building. They say what should be. They look at the result. They decide.

So Kenala is built with language and used with language. One is unthinkable without the other.

The line stays

Vibe coding does not mean the machine decides. Every change to a website is checked and looked at before it goes online. The AI is fast and patient. The judgement of what is good and what has to go stays with us.

What this feels like in everyday work, I wrote down in the Digital Garden.