A developer on r/vibecoding solved the most relatable problem in AI-assisted coding: what do you do while your agent thinks? They built a series of mini-games for their MacBook Touch Bar. The first one, “Fruit Salad,” lets them slice fruit while Claude processes prompts.
The insight underneath the joke is real. Running Claude — or any agentic coding tool — creates dead pockets of time:
- Too short to context-switch into another task or open a browser tab
- Too long to just stare at a spinner without your brain wandering
- Too unpredictable in length to plan around — sometimes 5 seconds, sometimes 45
So user u/devilwearsbata did the most vibe-coding thing possible: used the tool itself to build something for the gaps the tool creates. A Touch Bar game, built with Claude, played while waiting for Claude.
NOTE
The Touch Bar is Apple’s thin OLED strip above the keyboard on certain MacBook Pro models (2016–2022). Apple discontinued it, but millions of machines still have one — mostly unused since most apps stopped supporting it.
The post is lightweight, but it points at a genuine workflow friction that every agentic-coding user recognizes. Tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf all have moments where the AI is working and you’re not. Some developers use that time to review diffs. Others check Slack. This developer cuts virtual fruit.
There’s a design question buried here, too. As AI agents take longer autonomous runs — multi-file edits, test-run-fix loops, full feature builds — the wait windows will grow. The tools that handle “what does the human do during agent work” well will have an edge. Cursor’s background agents and Claude Code’s headless mode are early answers. A Touch Bar fruit game is another.
The meta-loop is the point: vibe coding is fast enough that you can build a toy to fill the downtime vibe coding creates. That’s either a productivity flex or a sign the tools need better async patterns. Probably both.