They struggled to care for their aging parents with dementia and cancer. They built what they needed themselves.

Pratik Desai’s childhood home in Roselle Park, New Jersey, is full of reminders of his mother, Smruti. After she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in her small intestine, he did what he could to keep her around a little longer.

The 34-year-old startup founder used AI platforms NotebookLM and Claude to create a tool that synthesized reams of medical information. In one instance, it told him his mom was dealing with complications of a pulmonary embolism. He ran the hypothesis by his cousin, a doctor, and rushed her to the hospital. Desai also said it caught mistakes and misdiagnoses in her records and advised him on what to ask during appointments. Doctors asked if he was a medical student.

Desai is one of dozens of “vibe coders” who have told Business Insider in recent months about how they built apps using simple prompts to chatbots. While many of these early adopters have some technical knowledge, LLMs and other AI tools like Cursor or Lovable provide natural-language prompts to generate code for those without the know-how.

For those with aging parents and ideas to help ease the burden, vibe coding offers a way to bring dream tools to life, even if sometimes imperfectly. Hanna Miller crafted a no-code Chrome extension to review online purchases by her father, who has dementia and would order the same package repeatedly. Bill Atienza, 29, helped older Americans, including his parents, improve their technology skills through vibe-coded tech support; one woman created an app with his help that allows her to speak with her late husband after uploading his voice into Perplexity.

Desai’s no-code solution couldn’t keep up with his mother’s 1,600 pages of notes, and he used his existing tech savvy to build a more complex system. He believes his workflow saved her life three times. She lived for 76 days after her diagnosis before dying at 67.

“My biggest concern was how do I get her as much time as possible with as much quality as possible?” Desai said, standing next to his father, Subhash, in the family’s living room. “Not only did we not have the time to deal with the emotional side, it felt immediately like I had to vibe code something and manifest it into existence that day.”

Making life more accessible

Amanda Lazar, director of The Health, Aging, and Technology Lab at the University of Maryland, said that vibe coding offers families a way to access customized tools that help ease a complex and varied process.

“There are always issues with these kinds of systems, and there is never a single solution, but it shows a real need and the level of customization and personalization that people need,” she said.

Danesh Davar, 36, watched as his mother suffered several hemorrhages in 2019, losing some motor function, including her ability to type. Davar couldn’t find dictation tools that fit her needs for under $500 a year. After taking a 2.5-hour vibe coding tutorial, he left his IT management job and built an app he later called Talkativ.

After working on smaller projects on the vibe-coding platform Cursor, Davar, based in London, began integrating more advanced features into the platform, which he built for about $200. The first two versions didn’t work well, he said, though he got the desktop app to dictate words in all text boxes and apps, read in over 50 languages, and incorporate auto-punctuation and formatting.

With zero ad spend, Talkativ reached 200 sign-ups in its first three months and processed over 12,000 successful dictations. Most importantly, his mom, who retired a few months ago, has used the system daily.

“She’s a rock star and very resilient in that if she puts her mind to something, she will do it,” Davar said.

Vibe coding can — and often does — go awry. Without technical acumen, many vibe coders struggle to detect errors in the code or to maintain code, which often requires periodic updates as software changes, for example. Vibe coding can introduce security vulnerabilities, and in some cases, personal information has leaked to the public.

Some vibe coders told Business Insider they worried their creations, if expanded on a broader scale without developer input, could backfire. A February study in Nature Medicine found that health advice from chatbots is often riddled with inaccuracies. In extreme scenarios, people who trusted AI over their doctors died. That’s why many of these vibe coders designed apps meant to be used alongside human input.

“When my mom was in the throes of dementia years ago, with my sister being the exhausted caregiver, I had many ideas for tools to support both. But the hurdles were high,” said Rick Robinson, vice president and general manager of the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. “Today, however, AI-fueled vibe coding platforms are making it much easier for normies to quickly go from idea to a working product.”

Ricardo Mota, 37, head of design for a tech company, began building his platform Eterna while navigating his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. He created a “memory vault” for WhatsApp voice notes, old chat histories, and other memories that his family could revisit.

“She doesn’t react that much anymore, but there are moments where she will,” Mota said. “I wanted to store those memories.”

Eterna is in beta testing with 150 users, and Mota is continuing to improve its features and privacy protections. For now, he’s cherishing the memories he and his mother share, playing songs for her that bring her back to a younger and healthier time.

Keeping track of life’s challenges

More Americans have begun vibe coding creative solutions to ease the burden of caregiving and solve recurring problems in their parents’ lives.

Ray Hollister encountered bumps along the road in vibe coding CareLog, which records on a calendar the caregiving work he and his wife provide for his mother and stepfather to help manage time and spending.

“They are older and needing more hands-on care lately, and we decided we needed to make sure we were documenting exactly what we were doing so that we had strong records,” Hollister said.

Matt Sanner, 54, only knew basic Python before vibe coding a scam education app for his parents. His mother-in-law had almost wired $5,000 to someone she thought was her grandson before a bank teller identified it as a scam. His father’s computer was hacked after he clicked a link from what he thought was his insurance company.

Sanner, a data manager in Tampa, decided a straightforward app could help his family understand tactics for detecting scams. He vibe coded the app with input from his parents, adding accessible features such as big buttons, adjustable font size, and clear and concise lessons.

His mother, Sue, 79, and father, Bob, 83, told Business Insider that the app has made them much more cautious. Bob checks in frequently with his son to confirm that he reacted the right way. It’s a welcome change as, according to Sue, he lost $500 a few years back in a scam.

“I must have completely erased that from my mind,” Bob said. “I would be willing to take responsibility for something that I could admit to, but that memory is gone.”

When medical data takes over life

Before last year, Srdjan Stakic, 49, had never touched code. He had a doctorate in health education and a master’s in film production, but his career came to a halt when he was diagnosed two years ago with stage four cancer. When he entered remission, his parents’ health declined.

He first used AI to generate summaries of his and their medical care. He wanted a system that could ethically observe them if he wasn’t home with them. He turned to Gemini and ChatGPT to brainstorm his idea while consulting his parents about scenarios such as a medical emergency or a fall.

To train the AI tool he built on Lovable, he uploaded training videos for nurses and healthcare workers. He built an AI equipped with cameras to detect falls, but he hired an IT company to help him connect multiple cameras.

He vibe coded the system to send notifications to loved ones or EMS workers, clipping footage from the incident and including their location and a summary of their health records. He’s building the system to be more robust as part of his startup, Alvis.

“It’s amazing to see how vibe coding is democratizing access to AI tools,” said Stakic, in California. “I still don’t fully understand code or the extent of what I built, but it seems to be working.”

Desai, who built the medical data workflow for his mother’s cancer, and his father, Subhash, stood in their living room glancing at a photo of Smruti. She was the matriarch of the family and was a “force of presence,” Desai recalled.

After hearing from friends and colleagues who said his tool could help them, Desai is programming a free version.

AI is still, of course, subject to error and can put those without existing tech skills down the wrong path, but even so, it opens the door to more options for caregivers.

“We were able to ask the right questions and push her doctors to do better,” Desai said.

Staying beside the bed where Smruti lived out her final days, Desai checked his phone. Messages from work poured in. One was from a colleague who wanted to learn more about the technology.

“This is going to change people’s lives,” Desai said as his father nodded in approval.