Context

Acorns of Wisdom

A team health check web app I built to teach myself AI-assisted prototyping. Recreated from a FordLabs tool I admired, with my own branding and architecture choices. Deployed and in use.

Try the app
Role
Self-directed
Timeline
2 weeks, February 2026
Stack
Built with Claude Code, React, Firebase, Firestore, Vercel
Acorns of Wisdom dashboard showing team health check ratings with acorn icons and anonymous animal identities

Acorns was the first time I took a vibe-coded project all the way to a public deployment. I wanted to actually learn AI-assisted prototyping, and the way to learn it was to build something my team would actually use, not a toy app. So I chose to recreate Vibez, a team health check tool from my time at FordLabs, with my own branding and a few architecture decisions I wanted to think through end-to-end.

Vibez gave me a starting point I already trusted. With the design problem out of the way, I could spend the two weeks on the build workflow itself: how to scope work for an AI coding partner, when to push back on its suggestions, what kinds of tasks accelerate and which ones still need careful human input.

Problem

Reading about Claude Code wasn't going to teach me what I needed to learn. The vocabulary, the rhythm, the failure modes of AI-assisted building only show up when you do it yourself.

I picked a target with the right shape: small enough to ship in two weeks, real enough to expose the actual work, and inherited enough that I wouldn't have to design from scratch. Vibez fit. It was a tool I'd worked with, I knew the bones were good, and I had a clear sense of what I wanted to keep, change, and add.

Approach

The core of Acorns comes from Vibez: anonymous ratings, default health-check prompts, action items captured in the same view as the data, real-time anonymous chat alongside the dashboard. I kept those mechanics because they worked.

What's mine is the surface and the architecture. Code names (Mauve Penguin, Cobalt Narwhal) sit on top of the anonymity layer so the chat reads as a conversation rather than as a wall of unattributed text. The acorn rating scale, the squirrel mascot, and the visual identity are all new. Underneath, the architecture is deliberately minimal: single Firestore instance, passcode-based access rather than full auth, no integrations, no historical analytics, no exports.

Vibez dashboard at FordLabs, the original team health check tool Acorns of Wisdom dashboard, the recreation with new branding and architecture
Vibez at FordLabs (the original) and Acorns of Wisdom (the recreation). Same core mechanics, different surface and architecture.

The session works in three steps.

Eight default health check categories shown as selectable cards with yellow checkmarks Custom question form with label and question text fields

Step 1: Set the agenda. The eight built-in prompts cover the dimensions most teams care about: autonomy, equipment, quality, stress, vision, and others. Facilitators toggle them on or off, and write custom prompts alongside the defaults for things specific to their team.

Sidebar showing 'You are: Mauve Penguin' with animated squirrel mascot Rating scale showing five acorn icons from red frowning to green smiling, with optional comment field

Step 2: Rate anonymously. Each participant gets a random animal name on join. The identity is consistent within the session so the chat works, but nothing traces back to the individual. Each prompt is rated 1 to 5 on an acorn scale, with an optional anonymous comment.

Expanded card showing individual vote breakdown and anonymous comments Anonymous chat panel showing messages between Mauve Penguin and Cobalt Narwhal

Step 3: Review and act. Clicking any rating card expands it to show every vote and every comment. The anonymous chat runs alongside so participants can talk through specific ratings as their animal selves. Action items live in the same sidebar as the ratings, so the team leaves with follow-ups.

Decisions

Three calls I made that shaped what Acorns is and isn't.

01

Code names on top of inherited anonymity

Vibez gave participants anonymous identifiers that read as user codes. They worked, but the chat panel collapsed into a wall of nondescript labels that didn't help anyone follow a conversation. So I added a code-name layer: random animal names like Mauve Penguin and Cobalt Narwhal, persistent within a session.

The change is small and the effect is real. Participants can address each other in chat, references stay coherent ("Cobalt Narwhal, can you say more about that?"), and the surface gets a little warmth without compromising anonymity.

What I learned. Inherited mechanics still benefit from a critical pass. Anonymity worked in Vibez, but the expression of anonymity could be better, and that small change made the chat layer noticeably more usable.

02

Built for a small team, kept that way

Acorns runs on a single Firestore instance with passcode-based access rather than full authentication. There are no integrations, no historical analytics, no exports. Each of those is a real limit, and each is the right call for the actual use case.

The pull to expand a small tool toward something more general is real, especially when AI-assisted prototyping makes the next feature cheap. I held the scope on purpose. A health check tool for an eight-person team is a different product than one for a fifty-person org, and trying to be both makes both worse.

What I learned. AI tools dropped the cost of prototyping features to try and test ideas. The cost of deciding what belongs in a small product stayed exactly where it was. Knowing what to leave out is still the design work, regardless of what's cheap to prototype.

03

Visual identity as part of the product, not as decoration

The squirrel mascot, the acorn rating scale, and the warm color palette weren't add-ons after the build. They were part of the product from the start. A team health check is a slightly uncomfortable thing to ask people to do, and a tool that signals "this is meant to be a little playful" lowers the activation cost. I drew the squirrel myself, instead of grabbing one from a stock library.

What I learned. Branding gets called soft when you're picking what to cut, but the soft choices are often the ones that determine whether anyone uses the thing. Treat the visual identity as a real design surface and ship with it from day one, not as polish at the end.

Outcome

Acorns is in active use on my team. The deeper outcome was the workflow fluency I came out with. I have a much sharper sense now of what's fast to build with AI assistance and what isn't, and that changes how I scope and validate ideas with engineering teams. A PM who has built something under constraint estimates differently than one who hasn't.

A few honest limits worth naming:

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