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How I AIHow a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex church event management system using Claude and Replit
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
A 91-year-old builds church event software via Claude and Replit
- John Blackman, a 91-year-old church volunteer, describes turning a manual paper-based “impact weekend” registration process into a full web app by using Claude to generate a roadmap, user stories, and requirements, then feeding that into Replit Agents to implement the system.
- The app supports multiple churches and events with role-based admin levels, participant registration via QR codes, service toggles, waivers and signature capture, and printable “impact passports” (PDFs) that attendees can bring to the event.
- It also generates operational reports (demographics for pastoral follow-up, service usage counts, food pantry/lunch ordering, vision center details) and includes an oil-change workflow that looks up oil/filter specs from a VIN using an API.
- They discuss practical realities of agentic coding—fast progress and low cost (hundreds of dollars), but real deployment pain around dev vs production differences, PDF/email attachment issues, and secrets management—plus broader advice about embracing new technology as they did with AutoCAD decades earlier.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasStart with a clear outline, then force the AI to ask questions.
John began with a Word document describing the workflow and explicitly instructed Claude to ask for missing details (“If you need more information… ask me the questions right away”), which produced more complete requirements and fewer gaps during building.
Using Claude as a product manager accelerates agentic coding success.
Claude generated an MVP roadmap, user stories, and non-functional requirements; those artifacts became the “source of truth” that Replit Agents could reliably implement.
Agentic tools can produce “enterprise-like” patterns from community needs.
The app includes multi-level admins, multi-church data separation, approvals for administrators, and reporting for ministry follow-up—capabilities that mirror multi-tenant SaaS design despite originating from a paper process.
Operational reporting is where the real value lands for events.
Beyond “a form,” the system outputs demographics lists for follow-up ministry, service-usage summaries, oil-change shopping lists, and food/vision center prep reports—reducing manual planning and errors.
The dev-to-prod gap is the biggest vibe-coding reality check.
John repeatedly hit issues where features worked in development but failed in production (PDF email attachments, environment variables/OpenAI key reuse), highlighting deployment, caching, and secrets-management as key pitfalls.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWe started at 10:00 and finished about 3 o'clock in the morning.
— John Blackman
I just took and copied what Claude had put together and put it into Replit… and then it started going bloo-whoop, and there it was.
— John Blackman
Sometimes he goes off on a rabbit trail, and I have to bring him back.
— John Blackman
It always doesn't work in production what works in development, and that was very frustrating.
— John Blackman
It's just like AutoCAD… A lot of my friends didn't want to learn AutoCAD… I was still having fun.
— John Blackman
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
