For as long as Silicon Valley has been selling a frictionless tomorrow, we ordinary people have been its passive shoppers—scrolling the App Store, hoping someone has gone to the trouble of building whatever we need. Enter AI and its democratizing sidekick: vibe coding. If the promise is real, suddenly we can build our own apps, as niche and trifling as we please, with zero programming skills. We merely gesture toward whatever irks us and a constellation of large language models, code generators, and development environments will click their heels. Where some vibe code résumé reviewers and inventory trackers and automated assistants, WIRED contributor Chris Colin had a different target in mind. Over the past couple years he had grown particularly fixated, personally and professionally, on what the policy world calls sludge: the rising tide of tiny administrative obligations that increasingly seems to define modern existence—and corrode our ability to get anything done. The hassle of dealing with insurance, or connecting that insurance to your doctor, or staying on top of airline miles, or navigating your kid’s school portal. The steps required to dispute a charge, or unsubscribe from a streaming service you forgot you had. Each of these feels like its own discrete assault on our time. Those hassles aren’t just accidental byproducts of complexity; they’re often features. A confusing portal, a dropped call, a process just opaque enough to discourage follow-through. At scale, they function less like bugs than like policy. The app Chris Colin envisioned would expose this phenomenon, make the cumulative weight of these obligations a little harder to ignore. But Colin isn’t a coder, and he doesn't have a technical background. Could he really build the app he imagined? Tap the 🔗 in bio to read the full story. 🎨: Yann Bastard