Sravya, the Genesis

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A Spark at the Stanford Executive Program

June 2025 was a turning point. I found myself in the thick of the Stanford Executive Program, six weeks of full-time classes on the beautiful Stanford campus. Strategy, leadership, culture, communications, AI, and more. It was like a compressed MBA, taught by some of the best minds in the world. It was intense and exhilarating.

And the reading. My god, the reading. Every class came with loads of it! Case studies. Book chapters. Sometimes more than one per session. Enough to bury anyone.

But here’s the thing. I don’t really “read” anymore. I used to read a lot of books and long form content. But then life got too busy, and I found it increasingly hard to sit down and read at length. These days I listen instead of reading. Podcasts, audiobooks, interviews, even research papers if I can get them in audio. I listen while jogging, commuting, making coffee.

So staring at this mountain of reading at Stanford, I wondered, what if I didn’t read any of it? What if I could listen to it instead? Could I turn every case study and assigned chapter into a personal podcast feed?

I had been deeply immersed in the evolution of Generative AI since 2023 and I knew that building an app that did exactly this was possible using the current state of AI. But where would I find the time to develop this app?

Vibe Coding

A few weeks before Stanford, back at work, a colleague showed me Google Firebase’s App Prototyping agent. You simply describe what you want and it generates a working app. It’s called vibe coding, a term coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025:

“There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

The idea is to let the AI write the code, test it, fix it, and iterate till it works. You guide it with prompts, course-correct where needed, and accept the messiness. You never read the actual code!

I had been thinking about vibe coding since then. Could this really work beyond toy demos? Were the critics right about fragile architectures, spaghetti code, security holes waiting to happen? I wanted to know for myself which made this the perfect experiment; kill two birds with one stone. Try vibe coding, and maybe solve my reading overload at Stanford!

The Vision: Auto-Podcastify My Stanford Readings

The idea took shape. Build an app that converts assigned readings into a podcast. Drop in a PDF or a chapter, get back a narrated audio file. Stitch them together, and I’d have my own SEP podcast feed to queue on a morning run.

This was the genesis of Sravya: an app that let’s you Read Less, Listen More.

It sounded simple, but building this would be anything but trivial. I didn’t want the app to create dumb read-aloud versions of text. It couldn’t be your basic text-to-speech. It needed to be smart to not read boilerplate headers and footers. It needed to know how to handle inherently visual artifacts like charts and illustrations. It had to sound good - like it was really meant to be heard as audio.

AI could probably get me there, but only if I told it clearly what I wanted. With these systems, vague instructions give you unusable results. Garbage in, garbage out.

Writing the Spec

So I needed a product specification first. I began by talking to ChatGPT, using voice dictation to dump my messy, half-formed ideas. The AI turned my ramblings into a rough product spec, something that started to look like real requirements. It listed features, inputs and outputs, a user flow, even some edge cases. I was vibe speccing.

Of course it wasn’t perfect. I had to push back, refine, add detail, re-explain things I hadn’t been clear about. We went back and forth. Each round improved the spec until it started to feel like something I could actually build from. When it felt close, I asked ChatGPT to break it into milestones. I knew from experience that if you throw a huge, complex project at these AI tools all at once, they choke. But if you build step by step, they have a fighting chance.

Armed with a spec and a set of milestones, I opened up Firebase Studio and got to vibe coding.

Coming Next

In the next post, I’ll walk through what actually happened inside Firebase.

To be continued …

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