July 13, 2026

2.5 Minute Read

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THIS WEEK'S EDITION

Three Vibe Code Projects For Public Affairs Professionals This Summer

By now you've heard the term "vibe coding" — describing what you want in plain English and letting AI build it. It has moved from Silicon Valley party trick to professional edge. In today's short read, we give you three summer projects that will make you sharper by Labor Day — each buildable in less than an hour, no engineering degree required.

First, Know Your Tools

This exercise assumes you're building on Claude, which we recommend for this type of work. Think of Claude in this case like a kitchen. Claude Chat (the regular chat window) is your countertop: perfect for one-off builds like dashboards and mini-apps you can see and click immediately. Claude Cowork is your sous chef: an agent that works across your actual files and software stack, and handles multi-step jobs on its own. @Claude (Anthropic's new "Claude Tag" in Slack, currently for Team and Enterprise plans) is the colleague who never leaves the group chat: tag it in a channel, give it standing instructions, and it works for your whole team.

Project 1: Legislation Tracker

Stop paying five figures for a fancy tracking platform that you don't need.

🔱 Start in Claude Chat. Ask it to build a dashboard that tracks your specific bills — by number, sponsor, and keyword — using free public data like Congress.gov or your state's equivalent.

🔱 Iterate in plain English. "Add a column for committee status." "Flag anything that moved this week." Each request updates the app in front of you.

🔱 Graduate to Cowork when you want it running on a schedule — checking for movement and dropping a summary in your inbox every morning before your coffee is cold. Just paste your tracker prompt into Cowork, test it, then type /schedule — it will run every weekday morning on its own, laptop open or not.

Project 2: Stakeholder Monitoring Alert

Google Alerts is walking. This is running.

🔱 If your team is on Slack, use @Claude. Give it a standing instruction: watch the news for your clients, coalition partners, target legislators, etc., and post a daily digest to your team channel — with two-sentence summaries and a "why it matters" line.

🔱 No Slack? Use Cowork. Ask it to run the same monitoring job on a schedule, search the web, and email you the digest.

🔱 Tune the signal. Tell it what to ignore (routine press releases) and what to escalate (anything with the word "subpoena").

Project 3: Social Media Drafting Bot

Not a bot that posts for you — a bot that drafts for you. Keep a human on the send button for QA and compliance.

🔱 Build a Project in Claude Chat from the toolbar. Upload your ten best-performing posts, your style notes, and your do-not-say list. Now every draft starts in your voice.

🔱 Feed it the news. Paste a bill update or a client win and ask for three versions: one for X, one for LinkedIn, one spicier option for the group chat's consideration.

🔱 Team version: @Claude. Tag it in your comms channel with "draft posts on today's markup" and everyone sees, edits, and approves in one thread.

What This Means For Public Affairs

Spending the most on software is no longer the path to efficiency. The winning teams are now the ones who conjure custom tools that fit their exact workflows — instead of contorting their workflows to fit someone else's legacy platforms. These three projects are training wheels. Once you've built them, you'll start seeing vibe-codeable problems everywhere. That instinct is the actual skill.

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