This Thanksgiving, I’m feeling especially grateful—and a little amazed—because I finally did something I’ve watched our community do for years: I built my own app with Harper. No coding background, no prior experience. I work in Marketing, after all…
All I really had was an idea and the determination to look at my computer every 20 minutes or so to approve whatever the AI wanted to try next. It was my first true dive into vibe coding using Google’s AI-native Integrated Development Environment, Antigravity —kind of like VS Code, but with deeply integrated AI.
I shared the Harper open-source repository with it, paired with our application template. Beyond that, I simply dictated what I wanted to ChatGPT and asked it to turn those thoughts into requirements for Antigravity to build from.
Inside Antigravity, I bounced between Gemini 3, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and whichever thinking model still had credits left. The whole thing became a rhythm of testing, describing updates, testing again, and refining further—a full vibe-driven marathon that I ran in between building a fence in my backyard. The AIs would often think and work for 20–30 minutes at a time, so I just kept an eye on things, clicked “accept” whenever needed, and clarified what was broken.
The result is a Thanksgiving game: a little Pac-Man-style maze where you dodge angry turkey emojis, collect Thanksgiving food, and race through five increasingly chaotic levels. I made it to level four before getting steamrolled. Maybe you’ll fare better. I still have no idea what the end screen looks like.
Behind the scenes, the app uses CRDT counters to track how many people are “online” (really: how many browser tabs you’ve opened). There’s also a leaderboard that updates every ~15 seconds via polling—because, candidly, real-time WebSockets defeated both me and the AI. And in true holiday-miracle fashion, once the repo was ready, deploying it to Harper Fabric was free and as simple as pasting in the GitHub URL, clicking import, and restarting the cluster. You can play it live at: https://happy.thanksgiving.harperfabric.com/
The AI even helped me set up my GitHub account, install npm, and all the other “basic” things I’ve somehow avoided until now.
What I’m most thankful for this year is realizing that ideas no longer sit behind the wall of technical complexity. With an AI-first IDE and a unified platform like Harper—where database, cache, messaging, and application logic all live together—building becomes less about wrestling with systems and more about expressing imagination. Maybe this is what the next renaissance of software looks like.
Perhaps Harper is becoming the first Integrated Development Technology—the missing counterpart to the Integrated Development Environments developers have used for decades.
Wishing you rest, joy, time with the people you love—and a high score on the leaderboard.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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