I never expected my first ever foray into vibecoding on Farcaster to yield results like this. Before I begin, here's where Bitquiz, the app that I've vibecoded over the last 2 weeks stands. It hit #10 spot in the most popular Farcaster apps, with 3000 plays, over 500 onchain transactions and almost 1000 unique users. It is more popular than well established apps from "big" players in the Farcaster ecosystem, such as Bracket, Morpho, Megapot, Degen, and others.

About 10 days ago I started thinking of building a Farcaster mini app, after seeing early success of Bitquiz that was built a week prior (first commit happened on September 4). Using Claude Code, which had a "happy incident" of crapping out on me exactly around the start date, and Cursor, I committed myself to build a simple quiz app game that I could enjoy myself. Quick questions, fast answers, and the cycle of new questions every time to keep things fresh.

Vibecoding is a weird art form. It is very easy to start, but then to really plan around how it would look and how it would feel is hard. I use the term "cajoling" to describe the struggle of vibecoding and trying to convince Claude that things have to be certain way.

The unexpected benefit of vibecoding is that I get to try and test the app quickly. The ideas that I thought were good turn out to be bad once I get to play the app I've built. From the really-really old days of product planning back at earlier startups, writing documentation and spec was often done in a vacuum — you think something is good, but you don't know until you know. Vibecoding, surprisingly, fixes that. For example, I started the app with just 3 questions and thought that refreshing these questions every hour is good. It turned out to be a bad idea, because it's easy to get bored and then forget to try the app again. Instead, now it is 10 questions and you can play anytime, questions will be reshuffled. Many such decisions were made, then adjusted, then improved or discarded. Overall, it feels like I am on a major version 7 or 8 right now, since how the scoring works, how the prizes work, and so on differ dramatically.

After seeing early success between September 5 and 12, when a few of my friends played the app, I wanted to embark on a journey to build a mini app on Farcaster. The idea is that it could help distribution, as I've seen and used other apps that became popular there. However, getting with a simple initial version took longer than expected, about 3 days. I fought with mini app specifications, I fought especially long with integrating notifications (they are very simple still), and started to feel the limitation of my knowledge to cajole Claude into making workable integrations between various APIs and services.

While vibecoding and seeing Claude effortlessly generating tons of code, I have a sinking feeling that tech debt is the real friends we make along the way on our journey of vibecoding. There's so much code that doesn't work. There's so much legacy code from rewrites that just happen because Claude felt adventurous. This is probably the area where humans are different from AI for now. Best developers I know they are like chefs — they clean as they go. They write the initial code, and then they allocate time to clean and rewrite the code once more. It is meditative, but vibecoding doesn't have time for that.

The true peak of Bitquiz popularity came when with some help, I integrated native Farcaster wallet payments. Users can get rewards, ranging from several cents to several dollars and more for being the best at a game. I funded the prizes, and spent good amount on getting people into the game. Lots of players play daily! For a game, I have to frequently tweak the scoring algorithm or introduce new ways to score. For example, the latest feature is to invite a friend with a referral link to earn higher score.

Well, the journey is only 3 weeks long so far. I gave myself some time to take this app to a logical conclusion, so there's a few more tweaks and features I would love to introduce for the users. In the meantime, give Bitquiz a try and stack your prize Bitcoin. Maybe, finally, your obscure knowledge of culture, geography and history can come in handy!