Matthew Lettini

I vibe-coded an itinerary app for my trip to Japan, then binned it

2026-05-20T17:22:00Z

I’m leaving for 🇯🇵 Japan on Monday, and I’m ready to admit that, as much as I want to do it more, travel stresses me out 😓 Between the planning and the booking and the packing and the FOMO and the waiting, I always get so anxious leading up to it. This can sometimes (often?) impact my enjoyment of said trip.

A month ago we contracted a friend of a friend to help with the planning. In some ways this took a burden off me, which is good, and we quickly got hotels and things booked I was procrastinating. I’m thankful. On the other hand, the constant back-and-forth and questions and itinerary creation felt even more heavy with a third party in the mix. I worry our itinerary is now too packed. I suppose I want a more laidback trip than is planned on paper? Was that his fault or mine? (Almost certainly mine.)

One of my stressors is that the deliverable from this contractor is a PDF itinerary with dates and times. It’s not editable, it’s not mobile friendly, and it’s especially irksome that page breaks land in the middle of days, rather than clean breaks (Update: this bit was fixed in the final version of the doc). It’s not going to be user-friendly when we’re there, walking about and checking in from a phone, and wanting to add to it.

So I asked Claude to create something for me, explained my vision, and it did a pretty good job within 1 prompt! I spent the next few hours/days cleaning it up and adding features, and figuring out how to get it hosted via Github Pages with JSONBin.io as a lightweight and free db. Here’s what it looks like at the moment:

You can toggle between 12h and 24h, categorize rows by Lodging, Transport, Activity, Lunch, or Dinner, and highlight rows green yellow or red if you want. Transportation is treated differently. I started adding some sort of maps functionality (the red pins), but it’s not working super well. You can also toggle to a Category view and see all events across days per category, and then filter by highlight color. It at least looks like what I was envisioning.

Once it got to a place where I though it was good enough, I started to copy/paste real info from our PDF itinerary into this app, and quickly hit a wall — it just takes too much time. It’s slow to fill out the form version of each row, plus its slow to sync to JSONBin with each edit. A spreadsheet would be infinitely faster. I could have AI convert everything, but I was trying to clean up the itinerary during the transition. Eventually I realized that I think building an app was more a way to relieve immediate stress than it was to relieve future stress. I do enjoy tinkering.

I’m writing this post mostly to remind myself that the itinerary is just a guide — we don’t have to follow it at all. We can easily get the laidback trip I envision. Also, while some are saying the vibe-coding revolution is here, it’s important to remember that most apps are just glorified spreadsheets with a different visual overlaid on top. Airtable has sort of recognized this, but I’ve always felt it’s way too heavy. I’d really like it if I could create a Google Spreadsheet, and have that power a completely customized front-end. If they can figure that out, and have Gemini build it for you, then I’ll probably still be entrenched to Google…

DM Vibing: Beyond Lost Mines of Phandelver

2026-05-10T22:34:00Z

My players are having a blast. They fully defeated Venomfang and liberated Thundertree, started acquired interesting and unique magic items, just saved Gundren, and are even starting to have character arcs, highs and lows, connected to their backstory. Every session I can see them anticipating the next session, and considering how they might bring some creativity to their next character choices. It’s definitely fun and motivating to me as a new DM to keep it up.

The problem is LMoP ends soon, after the next chapter. They’ll be level 5, but now highly invested in their characters and wanting to continue their arcs. How do I pull that off? Most of the written modules start at level 1.

The 2024 rewrite of LMoP smashed it together with Shattered Obelisk for levels 5-8, and after reading that I thought it sucked. There’s literally no connection between the two stories, and Obelisk is fucking weird. It doesn’t fit the vibe of this party.

Well, after much research and querying Reddit and ChatGPT, I now have a plan! I’m quite psyched about it. If we do it all, it’ll eventually bring us from level 5 all the way to 13.

The reason I wanted a plan now is because I want a smooth story transition. I want to start seeding the next story into the current story, and I’ve come up with a pretty good flow (I think, we’ll see when I actually run it). This plan required some creativity on my part as I need to bridge them a few levels between books, but what I’ve come up with should be perfect for the team and their world so far.

I don’t think my players read this blog, but just in case, I’m going to keep this post spoiler-free. All I’ll say is: A storm is coming…

My players are still using AI to create illustrations after each session. Weirdly, I don’t know if we’re getting too complex in our prompts, but the artifact lines in the drawings are really terrible and obnoxious lately. Maybe it’s a new update to ChatGPT? It’s a bit demotivating my players to make more images, but anyway here’s what was made since last post:

You don’t have to be a hardcore fan to root for a team

2026-05-08T14:30:00Z

I’m not a big Knicks fan, but I am a big New York fan, and it’s really easy to get swept up in the city’s energy when they’re doing so well¹. SidetalkNYC captures this beautiful.

I want New York to win, always. That’s enough for me to root for the Knicks in these playoffs! Though, OG Anunoby’s injury makes me nervous. I know enough to know he’s a quiet but pivotal piece for the team on both ends of the floor.

There’s likely a lesson in here to extrapolate this out beyond sports — it’s okay to root for someone, or some group, or some thing without having to be a lifelong fan. But I’m not here for big philosophical takes, so I won’t do that.

Let’s go Knicks.

Big 🙏 to Every Toilet in New York for taking me to Game 2 against Philly, a hard fought way-too-many-fouls grind of a win.

I’m not a fervent follower of John Goblikon,...

2026-04-29T22:03:00Z

I’m not a fervent follower of John Goblikon, nor Randy Feltface, but I have found both of them hilarious in the past and thoroughly enjoyed this, what I suppose can be called an episode of a podcast 🤣 —

A little short film about Norm MacDonald, by...

2026-04-17T13:31:00Z

A little short film about Norm MacDonald, by Aron Fromm —

Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender

2026-04-16T21:19:00Z

So the full movie leaked, and I watched it, and it was SOOO good, omg 🤯

Yes, I’m a huge ATLA fan, and this movie was peak Avatar — the writing, the story, the animation, the characters, the villian, the bending, everything. After The Legend of Korra left a sour note on the series (except for Zaheer, he was amazing), it honestly felt incredible to be brought back so earnestly and authentically to the original gang with a new story. More of this PLEASE.

Look, this fucking sucks for the team and the animators. I should probably feel worse for watching the leak instead of waiting. But Paramount should release it in theaters. I will go!

The shit Matt Tomasello is doing here is...

2026-04-09T18:19:00Z

The shit Matt Tomasello is doing here is breaking my brain 😵‍💫 —

I Iike my iPhone Air (not love, but still worth sharing)

2026-04-09T16:41:00Z

I was reading the article I finally get the iPhone Air by Allison Johnson for The Verge and I was reminded that I’m in the minority, both as an iPhone Air owner and as an iPhone Air enjoyer.

I’ve been rocking the iPhone Air with no case and the ultra-thin Ohsnap Snap Grip v5. This has been an awesome daily carry. I use my phone a lot, but I haven’t had any battery issues, and so far it’s been fine without a case (knock on wood!).

I am occasionally annoyed at the lack of multiple cameras and the single speaker, for sure. The single speaker is especially obnoxious as I watch more YouTube on my phone than I thought I did. If those two issues were different while the weight was the same, I wouldn’t want any other phone. However, the extreme light weight for an iPhone is so nice that, for me, it outweighs those issues. Again, for me.

Before I got the Air, I had been feeling pain in my fingers. It’s unclear whether that was specifically the fault of phone use, but I had been crying for years how I wish the iPhone Mini wasn’t dead. When they announced the Air, I was on board no matter what the compromises were.

The initial shock of losing those features was, well, a shock. It took some time. But like Allison concluded in their article, the Air grows on you. I’m not so bothered by the only-one camera and speaker now. More importantly, my fingers don’t hurt!

I know it didn’t sell well, and so we’ll see what’s available and if I upgrade when new phones drop. For me it all comes down to weight.

There is one issue I’ve experience with the Air and no other phone: it’s so thin, that I’ve actually lost the phone in the couch. Not just between the cushions, but between parts of the couch that you’re not supposed to lose stuff in!

Trying the Ricoh GR IV

2026-04-01T14:27:00Z

A Fujifilm X100 has been my camera companion for well over a decade now. I’ve owned several letter-based iterations over many years. I love its range-finder aesthetic, physical buttons, and unique OVF/EVF viewfinder. In that time, my shooting has evolved from RAWs that took years for me to get around to edit, to simply capturing lovely Fuji-colored JPEGs right from the camera. It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering that has been with me all over the world, helped me get better at shooting photos, and lives up to the hype it developed over the pandemic.

There’s just one problem: It could never beat my iPhone.

Not to say photos from the iPhone were better than the X100—they very much were not, for me. More so that the iPhone was in my pocket at all times, and the X100, even as compact as it is, wasn’t. And because it wasn’t, I only grabbed it before going on vacation, and not more regularly.

You can see this play out in my camera-only not-as-updated-anymore-and-I-need-to-do-something-with-it old photography website, where pre-2015 there’s more day-in-the-life stuff, and post-2015 it’s mostly I-left-NYC albums. And then there’s barely any albums after 2017. I suppose that’s when posting to Instagram hit a more critical mass for me, or when they added Stories, which I use much more readily than regular posts.

It’s been a few years now of going iPhone-only not just daily, but also on vacations and hikes and places I used to bring a better camera, and now there’s a new problem: While it’s in my pocket, I’m not actually taking photos with the iPhone, not to the extent I used to with a camera. And when I do take a photo, it’s kind of a shitty photo, just for the gram. I miss real photos!

So how do I square with-me-all-the-time, not-the-iPhone, and great JPEGs right from the camera? Research tells me to get the best pocketable point-and-shoot that rivals the Fujifilm X100: the Ricoh GR. It’s been the GR III for years now, so I waited, and when they released the GR IV last year, I ignored the price hike and jumped on the bandwagon.

If you were hoping this post would get to my experience with it so far, I hate to break it to you but I’m not there yet! I’ve had it only a few months, and I’m (1) still trying to get back into the practice of bringing it with me, and (2) trying to figure out my preferred color recipes/profiles.

I’ve been toying with some recipes, and I like that there’s a vibe but it’s much too saturated, especially the oranges. You can see that in these shots from Christmas 2025:

But I do love the sharpness and depth-of-field, and really that I have these shots at all—they wouldn’t exist if I only had my iPhone on me!

I’ll get more acquainted this year, and will be using this blog an outlet and excuse to use it more.

Jujutsu Kaisen is one of the most confusing,...

2026-03-27T18:25:00Z

Jujutsu Kaisen is one of the most confusing, esoteric stories and power systems I’ve seen in anime, but Season 3, now animated by Mappa, is truly on another level of insane. Constant 🤯 every new episode so far.

Frozen “lickies” as a dog cheat code

2026-03-26T17:14:00Z

I was creating more frozen dog lickies (as we call them) when it occurred to me this is something I could share with other dog owners as a dog cheat code.

We have a Blue Heeler mix who was a lot as a puppy, and we ended up with a few different trainers. The first one gave us this as homework. She made us buy these West Paw Toppl bowls, fill them with wet food, and freeze them. I put them in the plastic bowls just for the freezer, in case the food wants to seep out the front hole before freezing.

Between these and constant bully sticks, it taught our dog that, if she wanted to chew on something (which puppies are always trying to do), we had things she’s allowed to chew on. We’re still doing this ritual 4 years later and it’s her absolute favorite thing. It takes her some time to finish, is good for her, and it gives her something to focus on, so we like it too. They’re also easy to clean.

We’ve tried adding other food to them, like blueberries and other fruit, but our dog is a protein-first sort of dog, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I highly recommend this! They don’t take much time to create once a week and throw in the freezer.

The Last Quiet Thing is a beautiful little...

2026-03-17T20:03:00Z

The Last Quiet Thing is a beautiful little essay by Terry Godier —

My Casio is on my wrist right now.

It's telling me it's 2:50. That's all it's telling me. It collected no data while I slept. It has no report to show me. It has no opinions about my health, my habits, or my attention. It is, in this moment, asking absolutely nothing of me.

And that absence, the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up, feels like the most luxurious thing I own.

Not because it's retro. Not because it's minimal.

Because it's done.

My parents bought me an Apple Watch years ago and it just never clicked. Too always-on, too much noise, too close to my face. I’m pretty sure that, in the years since, my phone usage has, sadly, dramatically increased, but that’s besides the point.

I fell down the watch enthusiast rabbit hole in 2020, when my silly quartz watch died (again) in the middle of a pandemic. Enough was enough, I needed to try these automatic watches I kept hearing about that don’t have to deal with batteries dying. I’ve not gotten off the ride since. Of course, now my (many) automatic watches are frequently dead, but a quick few turns and they’re humming again. Just beautiful mechanical engineering on my wrist.

This post by Terry is speaking to me today, between a recent love affair for watches, and being a software maker just trying to make good enough software — implicit in that is also software that is done. I wrote a bit about that in a recent post about Letterbird.

Hey Rhodie

2026-03-15T17:51:00Z

It’s the last day of the week dog sitting for a friend. Everything’s copacetic today, excited to go home, but I want to revisit something I wrote on the first night we got here, but didn’t publish:

I’m writing this rant in the middle of my first night here in the Catskills (Kingston), house and dog sitting for a friend. I can’t sleep. When I do sleep, I’m having nightmares. My stomach is full of uncomfortable gas. The Hudson Valley is general beautiful, but the trains at night have always been so obnoxious, and this particular home we’re at has a nice indoors but the yard and driveway are full of mud from recent rain and melted snow—it’s not pleasant.

I’m feeling this way all because the dog we’re watching attacked my dog earlier today. It was quick but scary. I think I had a fight or flight response and my body hasn’t come down yet. This dog is crazy pants, never seen such high energy paired with extreme human possessiveness. My dog doesn’t stand a chance, and now I’m feeling like shit that I brought her to this unsafe location.

Can we last a week?

I didn’t hit publish because, as a not very prolific writer/blogger, I wasn’t ready for my third blog post here to just be an uncomfortable middle of the night rant. But this gives me a chance to revisit it.

Yes, the first couple of days were particularly hard. Rhodie is a 2 year old Heeler with more energy, jealousy, and aggression than Bowie, my almost 5 year old Heeler, ever had. We were warned, and I thought we were prepared having raised a Heeler ourselves, but I still felt thrown into the deep end on day one. It’s easy to forget how much effort these puppies require! I didn’t sleep at all that first night.

Now with some days behind us, my wife and I are more relaxed and comfortable with the dog and situation. Rhodie is high energy, yes, but brilliant and well-trained and loving. The owners have done a great job.

That said, the dogs have not become what I’d call “friends.” We had an almost-fight yesterday, but otherwise they’ve been tolerating each other / leaving each other alone. We’ve also been trying to break them up before something breaks out. Bowie seems upset at Rhodie trying to claim us, but scared to defend her territory.

My Instagram story sums it up:

Being on our toes all week has made this not much of a “vacation” as we had envisioned, but it was still ultimately a nice trip out of the city. Another reason we agreed to watching Rhodie was to gauge if we wanted another dog, which is something we casually talk about every now and then. This week helped us recognize that, while this level of energy isn’t for us, we do think we like the feeling of a family of 4…

DM Vibing: Lost Mines of Phandelver (Ep.4)

2026-03-09T03:07:00Z

Today was a great session. ✨

After a long, grueling, and almost deadly battle at the end of the Redbrand’s Hideout, it was so satisfying to see the party finally breath a sigh of relief when they actually survived, but it was exhilarating to see them all scream for joy when I said “…and you all level up!” I felt like a proud dad!

I’ve been playing D&D since college, but this is my first time being a dungeon master. I’m running Lost Mines of Phandelver on a suggestion from a friend. I’m obviously not great at it, yet, but I get by well enough (I think, at least for my wife and new-to-D&D friends). Doing my best to add flavor to towns, give NPCs personality, and ham it up sometimes, while also not getting too bogged down in unnecessary details. I think I can get better at atmosphere and steering further from the source material, and general voices and role-playing. But I’m not sure they’re noticing?

These friends of mine have been D&D-curious for a bit, and I set them up with my other friend (a wonderful DM) who ran a one-shot not too long ago. They had fun! But they also felt they didn’t get it… and I told them that’s because they didn’t really play the best parts of the game.

TTRPGS are games, but what makes them great is the cooperative storytelling. It’s creating and embodying a character yourself. It’s developing a backstory, why they’re here, why they are a hero (or villain). It’s figuring out their flaws, and how they deal with them.

All of this is difficult if not impossible in a short one-shot where someone hands you a character sheet. It takes time.

Don’t get me wrong — one-shots can be fun in their own right, and experienced players can likely get into a new character quickly. But beginners need more. My friends were missing the Session 0 character creation, the first few sessions and NPC interactions where they learn to find their character’s voice, the first big conflict where they’re faced with “what does my character I created in my head actually do in this moment?” And then live with those choices, long-term.

So the idea came up that I could run a game for them and give them that experience. I have been DM-curious for some time. Nervously, I said sure let’s try it, and I filed it in my brain cabinet under 2026’s stepping-into-the-unknown.

Four sessions in and I think I’m hooked. Seeing their excitement today really sealed it for me. I can’t wait to continue the stories of Brug the Harvester, Bramble Brightcoin, and Dagna Stonechime — and I think they can’t wait either!

My friends have been using AI to illustrate their characters in various parts of the adventure after every session. Setting aside the AI-in-art conversation, the visuals have really helped them get more into the game. They’re also objectively terrible and hilarious and I look forward to seeing how much the AI changes the party’s looks image to image.

Here’s the story so far…

I enjoy and connect with this essay from...

2026-02-26T00:12:00Z

I enjoy and connect with this essay from Greg Knaus:

There will be more software than ever, as its production is automated; we are entering the industrial age of the digital age. But less of this code will be elegant, or considerate, or graceful. Less of it will be created by removing what isn’t David, and less of it will be driven by a human understanding of human needs.

That was something I did that mattered. I’ll miss it.

(via Daring Fireball)

Now: February 2026

2026-02-20T22:34:24Z

Moving my personal website over to Pika and elbows deep in trying to make it the best place to blog on the web. Looking at search functionality…

Working on my vibe engineering. Recently switched from Cursor to Windsurf, but also experimenting with Conductor. The majority of my code and PRs are still written, rewritten, or at least intensely scrutinized by me, but I’m a much better Ruby on Rails coder than I’ve ever been. It’s like having an only semi-competent personal senior code instructor.

Trying to DM for the first time. Running the classic Lost Mines of Phandelver for my wife and a friend couple.

Binging Mad Men for the first time with that same friend couple.

Just started Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World. I can’t tell if it’s poking fun at isekai tropes or basking in their sometimes cringy ways. I heard something about watching at least through episode 15.

My Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover band “The No No Nos” have a show on March 26th at The Gutter in Brooklyn (come watch if you’re nearby). We haven’t played together all winter and need to practice.

I turn 40 this year, and to celebrate, we’re traveling to Japan in June. We bought flights, but now the stressful planning begins.

Hello World

2026-02-20T18:19:00Z

What a 2025! That’s my whole summary. I don’t feel like recapping in detail here and now, but it certainly was a year.

I’ve been thinking of moving my personal website over to Pika ever since we built it. Seeing as I now co-own Good Enough, it feels like the right time to really dogfood it. So here I am!

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a blog of my own. I’ve written a bit on the Harvest and Good Enough blogs over the years, but my own home on the web always goes static pretty quick. Maybe the extreme ease of blogging with Pika will have an impact? Maybe not. Either way, I’m looking forward to being here, and to 2026.

See you here/there 👋