Vibe Coding in a Tesla and Building Dashboards on a Smart Fridge: Welcome to 2026

If someone told you five years ago that developers would be writing code from the passenger seat of a Tesla and building custom dashboards on smart refrigerators at Best Buy, you'd probably assume they'd been spending too much time in the sci-fi section. And yet, here we are.

In the latest episode of Soapbox Sessions, Derek Ross and Heather Larson make one thing crystal clear: 2026 is the year of the builder. Not the year of talking about building. Not the year of planning to build. The year of actually rolling up your sleeves, firing up an AI assistant, and making things happen—even if "making things happen" means commandeering a retail appliance to prove a point.

What Exactly Is "Vibe Coding"?

The term sounds like something you'd hear at a tech conference after-party, but it perfectly captures what's happening across the decentralized tech space right now. Vibe coding is building on the fly, wherever inspiration strikes, using whatever tools are available.

Case in point: Soapbox team members Alex and MK recently found themselves in a Tesla, pulled up the browser, navigated to Shakespeare.DIY, and started building. No dedicated workstation. No carefully curated development environment. Just a vehicle, a browser, and an idea. The result? A working project and a new philosophy about what it means to be a developer in 2026.

The Great Smart Fridge Caper

Perhaps the most entertaining story from the episode involves an impromptu trip to Best Buy. The mission? Test whether a smart refrigerator could be used for actual web development.

Spoiler: it can.

The team accessed the fridge's built-in web browser, loaded up Shakespeare, and—using nothing more than a simple prompt—generated a custom refrigerator dashboard. Was it practical? Debatable. Was it hilarious? Absolutely. Did it prove that the boundaries between "serious development tools" and "IoT devices in your kitchen" are getting wonderfully blurry? Without question.

This kind of playful experimentation isn't just for laughs, though. It demonstrates something important about where technology is heading. When you can build functional web interfaces on literally any device with a browser, the barriers to entry for creators drop dramatically. Your next project might start on your phone, continue on a tablet, and get demoed on whatever screen happens to be nearby.

Building in Public: The Antidote to Perfectionism

Derek and Heather spend a good portion of the episode discussing the philosophy of building in public—sharing your work openly, documenting your experiments, and letting people watch you figure things out in real time.

There's something refreshing about this approach. Too often, we only see polished final products. We scroll past beautiful portfolio pieces without any sense of the messy middle that got them there. Building in public flips that script. It says: here's what I'm trying, here's what broke, here's what I learned, and here's what I'm doing next.

The Best Buy refrigerator stunt is a perfect example. Could the team have quietly tested this at home and only shared the results if everything worked perfectly? Sure. But where's the fun in that? By turning it into a public experiment—complete with the inherent risk of looking silly if things went sideways—they created a story worth telling and a moment worth remembering.

From Experiment to Application

Lest you think vibe coding is all party tricks and appliance hacking, Derek shares a more practical example: using Shakespeare to build a marketing website for Amethyst, a Nostr client developed by Vitor Pamplona.

The process was straightforward. Derek crafted a detailed prompt outlining what the site needed to communicate—the app's features, its benefits, its place in the Nostr ecosystem—and let the AI generate the content and structure. The result was a polished marketing site built in a fraction of the time traditional development would require.

This is where the "year of the builder" thesis really hits home. AI tools aren't replacing developers; they're amplifying what developers can accomplish. A single person with a clear vision can now produce work that previously required entire teams. That's not a threat to creativity—it's an invitation to attempt projects you never would have considered before.

The Takeaway

Whether you're a seasoned developer or someone who's never written a line of code, the message from this episode is clear: the tools are ready, the barriers are lower than ever, and the only thing standing between you and your next project is the decision to start.

Maybe you won't build your first app on a smart fridge. But then again, maybe you will. That's the spirit of 2026.

Soapbox Sessions is a podcast exploring decentralized communication, AI innovation, and the future of the open internet. Catch new episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.