I vibe-coded an app with Claude just to fix one of my smallest Windows annoyances

Published Aug 22, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT Nick Lewis is an editor at How-To Geek. He has been using computers for 20 years --- tinkering with everything from the UI to the Windows registry to device firmware. Before How-To Geek, he used Python and C++ as a freelance programmer. In college, Nick made extensive use of Fortran while pursuing a physics degree. Nick's love of tinkering with computers extends beyond work. He has been running video game servers from home for more than 10 years using Windows, Ubuntu, or Raspberry Pi OS. He also uses Proxmox to self-host a variety of services, including a Jellyfin Media Server, an Airsonic music server, a handful of game servers, NextCloud, and two Windows virtual machines. He enjoys DIY projects, especially if they involve technology. He regularly repairs and repurposes old computers and hardware for whatever new project is at hand. He has designed crossovers for homemade speakers all the way from the basic design to the PCB. Nick enjoys the outdoors. When he isn't working on a computer or DIY project, he is most likely to be found camping, backpacking, or canoeing. Sometimes a Windows bug is too small to carefully fix but too annoying to ignore. For years, my sound card has had its output mode switched from stereo to 5.1 after every reboot. Fixing it manually isn't difficult or all that time-consuming, but over the thousands of reboots since I purchased the card years ago, it adds up to several hours just changing audio device configurations. Windows updates haven't fixed the issue, and the device's drivers don't seem to help either. So, I created a small application with Claude that lets me click once to swap instantly. It hasn't "solved" the problem, but it has made it tolerable. Vibe coding an app is 70% preparation Don't try and make an AI guess what you want Modern AI models are fully capable of writing functional code; that hasn't been a major issue in a long time. The bigger problem is that they can't intuit what you want. If you give an AI a vague prompt, you'll get a competent enough solution, but it probably won't match what you actually want it to do. Any time you start on a vibe-coding project, it helps to be as specific as possible. If you don't, you'll wind up with software that lacks the menu items you want, behaves unexpectedly, or includes features you don't need. Always try to carefully define what you want an app to do, what form you'd like it to take, and how you'd like it to work, if you have a distinct preference. If you want specific settings or menus exposed, know about them in advance and make sure whatever AI you're using is aware of them before you start building the project. My vibe coded sound card tray app wasn't detailed enough and Claude went way too far. It basically rebuilt the Sound menu from the Control Panel. If I'd been paying per-token, that would have been an expensive mistake. My sound card has an annoying quirk Windows and my sound card don't mix well Credit: Sergio Rodriguez / How-To Geek Several years ago, I purchased a Sound Blaster PCIe sound card. The card still puts out better sound than any onboard sound card I've tested, but it comes with an impossibly annoying quirk: every time I reboot my PC, the speaker configuration is reset from stereo to 5.1 surround. It isn't harmful, but it is annoying. With my stereo headphones on, the center and surround audio signals get sent to channels that don't physically exist, which makes everything sound weirdly hollow. Games also seem to read this property, since they'll autodetect a 5.1 surround sound system instead of headphones. That means a lot of game sounds completely vanish. Worse, sometimes I do use a 5.1 surround system, which means a more forceful solution (like a scheduled task) is not a good fit. I can manually fix it by digging through the Control Panel to the legacy Sound settings, right-clicking my sound card, selecting "Configure Speakers," and setting it to stereo. It only takes between 10 and 15 seconds each time, but I've been contending with this bug for years. Rather than wade through a mess of applications that might be able to make it easier to address that setting, I decided to vibe code a small tray application instead. Claude created StereoTray It perfectly addressed my issue Since I was building an application that only needed to work with my specific setup, I provided as much detail about my OS and specific hardware configuration as possible. I also told it that I wanted to be able to just click the tray icon to toggle between 5.1 and stereo without right-clicking anything. A right-click menu that exposes extra options like playback devices would also be helpful, since I occasionally run into issues where Windows activates and switches to the incorrect audio device. It thought, researched, and worked for nearly 40 minutes before it output a program, but when it did, it worked perfectly. There is a small icon on the taskbar that I can click. When I'm in stereo mode, the icon has two white dots with a green background; when in 5.1 mode, there are 6 white dots (one for each output channel) and an orange background. I can click once to switch, or right-click to open the Sound Control Panel settings, change playback devices, or swap to 5.1 as the new default. Custom applications are easy to make now Once, small custom utilities required days or even weeks of development time. Even if you knew exactly what you wanted to do, it was often too much of a time investment to make it worthwhile. Now, however, there really is no such barrier. So long as you're specific with your design parameters—especially as your project grows in complexity—and your idea is technically feasible, you can create purpose-built applications almost as quickly as you can think of them. Should you trust them for something that you rely on for work or your health? Absolutely not. But they don't need to be groundbreaking to be worthwhile. Solving a minor annoyance or creating a small utility is almost as gratifying as solving a large problem.