This article was originally written in Japanese and translated into English with AI assistance. Please note that some expressions may carry nuances from the original Japanese.
🇯🇵 日本語版はこちら / Japanese version
Series: Byproducts Born from Setup Hell — Building a macOS App with Vibe Coding (Vol. 0)
Toward the end of 2025, I was just planning to replace my Mac for video editing—nothing more. I had absolutely no idea that, two weeks later, I would be working with AI to produce roughly 20,000 lines’ worth of design documentation.
That said, producing design documents does not mean the software is finished. The review of the contents is still ahead. I have zero programming experience, so my only real partner in this challenge is AI. Whether this challenge will ultimately succeed — honestly, even I don’t know.
In this blog, I will record the process of someone like me working together with AI to take on software development, exactly as it happens. It might be completed, or it might hit a wall somewhere along the way. By leaving a real record that includes both possibilities, I hope it can serve as a reference for anyone who feels, “Maybe I could build something too.”
Hello — my name is Satoshi Kanazawa, and I run Soul Resonant Works.
25 Years in Theater, and 20 Years with Mac
My main career is as a company employee, in a role that involves international communication.
Alongside that, I have continued theater and band activities as hobbies. I’m not a hardcore participant — more of a casual one — but the years have simply stacked up. It has been about 25 years since my first involvement with theater, and about 10 years with band activities. I’m what you might call an enthusiastic amateur—someone who never quite grows out of the beginner stage, but keeps going anyway. I think it’s simply because I love it.
My role is mostly behind the scenes. Handling sound for theater performances, supporting operations, taking stage photos, shooting performance videos. I rarely stand in front of the audience, but I love being in a place where audience, performers, and staff can all share an enjoyable time together — and seeing everyone enjoy themselves.
Because I deal with video, the innovative UI of Mac, a recommendation from an Apple-enthusiast associate professor, and my own desire to try video editing all came together. In 2004, I bought a PowerBook G4. Since then, I have used Mac continuously for more than 20 years. Every time camera pixel counts increased, my Mac’s processing power fell behind, and I kept upgrading every few years to get here.
How an Overpowered Mac Led Me to AI Development
In recent years, the video world moved from 4K to 8K, and the Intel iMac I had been using could no longer keep up. I started considering a new Mac, but honestly, buying a high-performance Mac felt like more power than I could reasonably justify for a hobby. Video editing alone could not justify that kind of investment. I felt I needed to keep other uses in mind as well.
It was around that time that the term “Apple Silicon” caught my eye.
As I looked into it, I learned something unexpected: instead of using AI services over the internet like ChatGPT or Claude, you can run AI models directly on your own Mac.
“So, could my own challenges be solved with AI?”
That question was the beginning of everything.
The multilingual communication walls I had felt at work. The challenges I had run into in theater sound and video production. Maybe these could be solved with local AI — through dialogue with AI, that question grew into an idea.
The Design Documents Are Written. But the Real Work Starts Here
At the end of December 2025, I began designing the systems by talking things through with AI.
I used a method called “vibe coding.” Rather than writing in a programming language, you tell the AI what you want to build in natural language — in my case, plain Japanese — and work together with the AI to create designs and code.
In about two weeks, I produced design documents for seven AI systems. About 20,000 lines. Even I was surprised.
That said, to be honest, I just produced them. The documents took shape through dialogue with AI, but my own review is not yet finished. This is probably a common pattern in vibe coding: I lack the experience to fully judge the quality of what the AI has produced.
Can this really be called “design documentation”? Is the quality good enough to implement from? Verifying that is part of what lies ahead.
All seven of these systems are designed to run entirely on my own Mac — fully offline, one-time purchase tools. For example: a tool that lets every participant in a meeting where Japanese, English, and French are flying around receive meeting minutes in their own language. A tool where AI automatically selects and edits footage from multiple cameras at a theater performance. A tool where AI analyzes multi-track recordings and proposes the optimal mix.
All of these are things I’ve wished existed during my time in theater, video production, and international business. I don’t yet know whether they’re truly achievable, but I believe the challenge is worth taking on. For details, please see the Soul Resonant Works site.
The Name “A Workshop Where Passion Resonates”
I had also produced CDs during my band activities, and I decided to position my music activities as a side business, which led me to register as a sole proprietor. The trade name is Soul Resonant Works.
Whether in theater or in a band, I feel it is the passion that burns within us that sustains these activities. Even as a company employee, rather than drifting along on inertia, thinking “let me improve this” or “let me add a little more to the outcome” — I believe that too comes from passion. In work, when passion is lost, the work becomes entirely obligatory, and any sense of forward momentum disappears.
Work, theater, and band activities all involve lots of human connections, and people with similar passion tend to gather together.
“I want to create a place where passionate people come together and make something” — from that thought, I named it Soul Resonant Works: a Workshop where Souls (passion) gather and Resonantly amplify each other.
What I’m Working on Now
My current passion is directed toward software development that “solves my own challenges using AI.”
While preparing to implement the seven AI systems, I went through an enormous amount of struggle migrating data from my iMac to the new Mac. Scattered files, macOS-specific traps, weeks of manual work — I thought, “Let me turn the tool that solves this very suffering into my first product.” So right now, I am working with AI to develop a data migration and deduplication tool for macOS.
If it gets completed, it will be Soul Resonant Works’ first product. If it doesn’t, I’ll understand “why it didn’t work.” Either way, this experience should be valuable.
By the way, some readers may have noticed something odd by now. “You started design at the end of December 2025. Four months have already passed. And the first product still isn’t done?”
That’s exactly right. Four months in, my main product still isn’t complete. However, during those four months, three products I had never planned began to move forward. Every time I tried to head toward the main business, something else was born — the second post in this blog isn’t part of the main development record, but it will describe what happened during those four months.
About Soul Resonant Works
Soul Resonant Works is a solo venture developing seven local AI systems.
Starting from zero programming experience, the development is progressing through collaboration with AI.
🌐 Soul Resonant Works:
→ https://www.sr-works.net/en/
📝 This blog publishes the entire development process as a serialized journal.
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