I Built a Mapping Tool Without Writing Code

I needed itinerary map images for a project. Those where cities are marked, routes drawn between them on pretty maps. After searching a few minutes, I couldn’t find something I liked so I “vibe coded” a tool to solve it.

What’s vibe coding: You describe what you want in plain English and AI builds it. No traditional coding required. Just conversation that turns into working software.

A few hours of back-and-forth conversation later, I had a complete 1000-line tool working exactly the way I wanted. Automatic location lookup, route lines, country highlighting, image export. I didn’t write a single line of code. All built by Claude Code.

You can try the Map Maker here: https://map.eric.fun/

I did provide simple requirements like it should be a single index.html only, no server needed, client-side only, and only use opensource and free APIs.

I also ran it through OpenAI Codex for cleanup, though the original was already solid. I wanted to test their latest model.

Two friends immediately asked to use it for their projects after I shared it. A 2-hour project became a useful tool.

This shift is wild. Building custom software used to take days/weeks of learning libraries, building, and debugging. Now it takes an afternoon conversation. The bottleneck isn’t coding ability anymore. It’s clearly explaining what you need.

This was just a simple mapping tool, but it points to something bigger. What is the future of software if anyone can generate any tool on demand? We might be heading toward a world where every problem has its own custom solution. The constraint was always time and technical skill. Remove those, and suddenly every workflow irritation becomes worth solving. Every “I wish there was a tool for this” becomes reality in an afternoon.

Source code of Map Maker is available on Github.