I Just Vibe Coded a Markdown Editor With Google AI Studio ⭐

We live in a time of wonder and magic. I just used Google AI Studio to create a full-featured Markdown editor and it’s alarmingly good.

This is a new feature of Google AI Studio, one of the approximately 17,000 announcements that the company made during the opening day of Google I/O 2026 yesterday. OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but we’re still struggling to keep up with the tsunami of news that came out of Mountain View. And this was just one of many developer-focused announcements.

It was also important enough, to me, that I put it at the top of my rundown of new developer advances. And important enough, to me, that I immediately started experimenting with Google AI Studio, a web-based integrated developer environment (IDE) that uses generative AI to help developers prototype applications. And, now, create them as well.

Granted, what I’ve seen so far doesn’t match what Google describes in its announcement post. According to the company, one can now use Google AI Studio to “build entire Android apps in minutes from just a prompt.” Exciting, but this is supposed to be “native” apps, not just web apps.

“People want more on their mobile devices,” Google explains. “They expect the beautiful and usable modern app design and capabilities that come with native Android user experiences, built with the Kotlin programming language using Jetpack Compose, the official and recommended toolkit for Android development. Native Android apps bring the reliability of offline support, continuous background services, and the deep integration of hardware sensors like GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC.”

This was interesting timing for me. As part of my research–again, meaning nothing more than just “Googling, reading the web, and watching YouTube videos”–tied to future focus month topics that may or may not involve a new coding project, I have been investigating Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, the latter of which Google just crowned as the “standard for Android UI development.” (For those curious about such things, Jetpack Compose, like the XAML used in .NET/WinUI development projects, is a declarative UI creation scheme. But unlike XAML/.NET–and like SwiftUI in the Apple Camp–Jetpack Compose uses the same language, in this case Kotlin, for UI and programming logic.)

Interesting timing, and exciting too: Starting from scratch with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose will require a lot of time and effort because so much of it is so new (to me) and because it’s evolving rapidly this year with Google shifting Android to include a desktop mode for a coming generation of Googlebook laptops.

The way Google describes it, you can just use AI Studio to describe the app you want and it will display the results in an “embedded Android Emulator directly in your browser.” Plus, you can also connect an Android phone to the computer over USB and then install the app you (cough, Gemini) just created. And then, if you like, you can even publish that app to Google Play and/or “hand off your project” to the full Android Studio IDE. Dear God, the mind boggles.

I had to try it.

Immediately, I learned two things. First, I was able to create an incredibly powerful and feature-rich Markdown editor that vastly exceeds my needs with just the simplest of prompts. And second, AI Studio doesn’t do anything else that’s described above. The app it creates is a web app, using TypeScript and React, not a native Kotlin/Jetpack Compose Android app. You can’t run it in an embedded emulator, it just previews in a pane inside AI Studio. And you cannot install it on your phone, hand it off to Android Studio, or publish it to Google Play.

And yet.

I’m still blown away by how good this app is. And it’s worth pointing out that the web app nature of this thing means I could use it in Windows, Mac, or just about anywhere else, too, and not just Android. I was so impressed by the app created that I subsequently refined my prompt and iterated through several different designs.

And dear God. This is truly spectacular. I spent years, literally, creating and then updating various versions of my .NETpad and WinUIpad clones of Notepad in Windows, in the most recent cases spending (wasting) several months trying manually to implement complex support for multiple documents and tabs. I got incredibly close on my own and actually did create an architecture that worked. But I needed AI to get it over the top, and then I was able to wrap it up in just a month or two at most.

Whatever anyone thinks of AI, know this. In software development, AI has gone from a glorified, embedded Google/StackOverflow experience, a sort of pair programmer partner, if you will, to a full-fledged “holy crap it can create anything”-type solution in the blink of an eye. A little over a year ago, vibe coding was completely misunderstood as a term because the term’s inventor meant it as a way for professional developers to move forward quickly on fun new projects that would always require some knowledge of coding. But today, thanks to the speed at which AI progresses, vibe coding has caught up to the misunderstanding. That is, anyone can now vibe code their own apps.

Google AI Studio is just one example; Google is also allowing normal users to vibe code their own custom widgets in Android 17, for example, though it’s not using that term for obvious reasons. But it’s also perhaps the best example, even if it’s currently limited to web apps. Obviously, the native Android app capabilities are either coming soon or there already and I just somehow missed it. (That said, I specified a native Android app using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose in one iteration and AI Studio still spewed out a web app.)

My first attempt to create this app couldn’t have been simpler. I prompted AI Studio with:

I would like to create an android desktop app version of a full-featured markdown editor similar to typora. It should run perfectly on large screen devices and it’s OK if it works on a phone too.

It worked on this for 158 seconds.

What it created was a complex, busy-looking mess, and it took me a bit to understand what it was I was looking at.

The issue here is that it created a multi-pane monstrosity, more like Notion or Obsidian than Typora, with a navigation pane on the left, a text editor, a preview pane, and then a Gemini co-writer pane on the right. None of which I had asked for. Which brings up an interesting point: Even those not interested in coding have surely heard that computers will simply do what you ask and nothing more, and that this is the cause of many bugs and badly-written programs. (Think HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) But AI is the opposite: It infers what you want and in cases like this it can give you much more than you asked for. With AI, it pays to be specific.

As originally written, the AI Studio-generated app supported hiding most of the panes. When I hid the navigation and Gemini co-writer panes, it looked like the side-by-side Markdown editor type app I described in Switcher 2026: Markdown Editors ⭐️.

That’s pretty good. But I was looking for a standard WYSIWYG editor experience. You know, like in Typora, a sort of pseudo word processor that works with Markdown files. The closest I could get this original version to that was to toggle on a Live Preview mode I never asked for where I could just see the HTML output of the document.

Given this, I prompted AI Studio to add a WYSIWYG editing mode. Which it did, though it hid this feature inside Live Preview mode: You have to toggle into that and then there’s a Read Mode/WYSIWYG toggle. In the latter mode, you can edit the text in the document normally.

OK, fine. And, again, incredible. This is insane.

But it’s also not what I wanted. So I iterated through a few other versions of this app, new projects in Google AI Studio in which I kept refining the prompt. After trying and failing to create a native Android app version a few times, the most recent prompt reads like so:

I would like an app that looks and works like the Markdown editor app Typora. It should include the ability to open and save files, use a WYSIWYG editing view by default, and support all the normal keyboard shortcuts as per a word processor. The design should be minimalist, with no sidebar. It’s just an editor, not a file manager.

This time, AI Studio created something much closer to what I wanted. The tool is rather incredible in that it provides a series of potential features you might want to add while it’s generating. In this case, it also provided a few theme choices, so I picked the most minimalist of those. And then I accepted a few of the feature additions. For example:

Add functionality to export the current Markdown document to HTML and PDF formats. The export should preserve the formatting and layout as closely as possible to the WYSIWYG view.

And …

Implement Markdown syntax highlighting in the Typora-like editor. Ensure that common Markdown elements such as headers (#), bold (*), italics (), and lists (- or *) are visually distinguished in the WYSIWYG view as the user types. Make sure that Ctrl + K is used to insert a hyperlink

What it came up with is this.

Again. This is incredible. Simply incredible. There are bits I didn’t ask for, like focus mode and the block editing. But it supports file open and save, as requested, so I tested it with a book chapter. Very nice.

And this entire process, for the latest app iteration, might have taken all of 15 minutes including my additional prompts. This is impressive. You can see it for yourself if you’re curious: Using the built-in Publish tool, I made the app available publicly on the web.

As Arthur C. Clark–the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels, but also the excellent Rendezvous with Rama series and many others–once observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s precisely what this is. Magic.