Your first instinct might be to use an AI-assisted integrated development environment (IDE), one that you've heard is good for vibe coding, like Windsurf, Cursor, or even Claude Code (which technically isn't an IDE, but that's besides the point). All of these tools are built for AI coding, so they're the best place to start, right? These tools are designed to make highly productive programmers even more productive, and that means they assume a level of knowledge that amateur coders--like you and me--lack. Diving into these programs straight away is likely to leave you confused and discouraged. Not to mention that AI-powered IDEs are pretty darn expensive, too.

I've always had an interest in programming, because I've always had an interest in computers. I put together websites in HTML as a teenager (which, yes, were hosted on GeoCities) and have been occasionally dabbling in Python since. Yet none of my projects got very far and, apart from my early websites, I never made anything useful. My efforts all followed a familiar pattern: I'd fixate on a particular resource--like an O'Reilly book or an online course--and get started with great enthusiasm, but as I'd realize I was months or years away from creating anything remotely useful, I'd give up. That changed in late 2024 when my general frustration with WordPress, which I was using for my personal website, got the better of me. In a fit, I threw my website's content plus a screenshot of it into Claude 3.5 Sonnet and asked the AI to replicate my site with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

A man who used ChatGPT to go on hundreds of dates has found love and is engaged with a woman he met during his AI dating spree. Alexandr Zhadan, 23, matched with 5,000 women on Tinder and used a modified version of the AI software to whittle those down to a shortlist of 100 who he then dated. 'I broke up with my ex, and I wanted to find a new relationship, and I felt a bit exhausted about the idea of just swiping people on Tinder, and finding out that this is not the right person for me. 'I was talking about this with my friends, and one of them mentioned the idea of GPT, and how it could optimize finding dates. And it became a pet project.'

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to multiple year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

The startup behind the Prisma style transfer app is shifting focus onto the b2b space, building tools for developers that draw on its expertise using neural networks and deep learning technology to power visual effects on mobile devices. It's launched a new website, Prismalabs.ai, detailing this new offering. Initially, say Prisma's co-founders, they'll be offering an SDK for developers wanting to add effects like style transfer and selfie lenses to their own apps -- likely launching an API mid next week. Then, in the "next month or so", they also plan to offer another service for developers wanting help to port their code to mobile. This was, after all, how the co-founders originally came up with the idea for the Prisma app -- having seen a style transfer effect working (slowly) on a desktop computer and realized how much potential it would have if it could be made to work in near real-time on mobile.

Sphero, that cute robotic ball that proves that BB-8's underlying physics work, is more than a toy. It's a great way of teaching children how to code. Kids have made everything from sea vessels to modern art with the little ball-bot. The company just updated the SPRK edition designed specifically for tinkering. The Sphero SPRK features a more scratch-resistant transparent body so youngsters can see what's inside.