As I’ve gotten older and more out of shape, building an exercise habit has been a real struggle for me. Like a lot of people, I’d decide to start exercising and go hard for a week or two. Then life would get in the way. Or I’d get tired of it. Or whatever. I made New Year’s resolutions, only to not follow through. I did a couch-to-5k and hurt my knee.

A couple years back, I read Atomic Habits. As I wrote back then, it was an excellent read, one of the few life changing books that I’ve come across. There were a couple ideas I took away from it that I thought I could apply to building an exercise habit:

1. A one percent daily increase is a 37x increase in a year.
2. One push-up is better than no pus-ups.

I took these two ideas quite literally and made a spreadsheet to build up an exercise habit. It started me at one push-up, one lunge per leg, and five crunches per day and increased 1% daily (rounding to the nearest whole number, because 1% of a push-up doesn’t make sense). By the end of the year, I had a little five minute workout.

There was only one problem: It was boring. Ok, two problems. It wasn’t exactly well rounded. Fine, three problems. The lunges were hard on my previously mentioned knee. I needed something more rounded. So, I shifted that five minute workout to 5 minutes of yoga.

I kept the same approach of a spreadsheet with a 1% daily increase. I also added one song from Just Dance for a bit of cardio. So I was starting with about 8 minutes of exercise time. Within three months, I was up to an hour total.

This is where things got interesting.

I wanted to start doing a more standard workout pattern with cardio days, strength days, and yoga days. My spreadsheet was going to get pretty complicated. I needed something more robust.

Enter vibe coding. I got to work in Claude building a workout tracker that would apply my 1% growth to specific routines. It only took me about a month of working a little bit here and a little bit there to get what I wanted. At the end, I had something that I thought was pretty cool. I looked it up and was shocked to find that atomicworkout.com is available, so I bought the domain and now it’s available for anyone!

It’s still a little buggy, what you might call a “beta release.” But I intend to keep working on it. We’ll see where it goes!

The whole experience has gotten me really excited about vibe coding. While I have a background in front-end development, my skills are rusty and the math involved got pretty complicated. I’m not sure I ever could’ve built this myself and, even if I could’ve, it would’ve taken much, much longer. The technical skills were so low, and Claude walked me through them all, that I think anyone with a computer could do this.

I’m not exactly an AI skeptic, but I haven’t really been on the hype train until now. This was the first time I’ve really seen AI do something that filled a real world need that never would’ve been fulfilled otherwise. I’m looking forward to my next vibe coding project!