Late last week, I described to Grok what I wanted: a simple, focused news aggregator for the Educational Freedom Institute website—one that pulled together the most relevant, timely stories on school choice, education policy, parental rights, critical ideologies in classrooms, and threats to educational freedom. It’s something I’ve wanted for years, and now with AI it could become a reality for families, policymakers, researchers, and anyone else tracking the real battles in K-12 education.

Long ago I learned very basic HTML, CSS, and even a little PERL, but I’m no developer. My background is in education advocacy, research, and writing—not servers, APIs, or JavaScript frameworks. Yet in a handful of back-and-forth prompts, Grok walked me through the entire process. That experience—what people are now calling “vibe-coding”—felt like having a patient, infinitely knowledgeable engineering teammate who never got tired or judgmental.

Vibe-coding, as I’ve come to understand it, flips the script on traditional programming. Instead of wrestling with syntax, debugging loops, or Googling obscure error messages, you describe the vibe: the feel, the goal, the constraints. Grok (or whichever AI you’re using) handles the translation into working code, architecture suggestions, hosting advice, and even troubleshooting. You iterate conversationally—“make it cleaner,” “add RSS feeds from these sources,” “filter out anything behind a paywall”—and it refines.

For EFI’s website, the initial prompt was straightforward: “Build me a lightweight news aggregator page that curates recent articles on school choice, education reform, critical race theory in schools, teacher unions, and related policy from reliable sources. Pull from RSS feeds or APIs where possible, display headlines with excerpts, links, dates, and sources. Keep it fast, mobile-friendly, and embeddable on our WordPress-ish site. No login required, no ads.”

From there, Grok outlined options: static site generator vs. dynamic fetch, RSS parsing libraries (like feedparser in Python if server-side, or client-side JS), potential APIs (Google News? No—too broad; better to hand-curate a list of trusted feeds from outlets like EdWeek, The 74, Fordham Institute, National Review education desk, and a few state-level trackers). It suggested a simple HTML/CSS/JS frontend with vanilla code to avoid dependencies, or Next.js if we wanted something more robust later.

We settled on a client-side approach first: JavaScript fetching and parsing RSS via a proxy (to dodge CORS headaches), sorting by date, filtering keywords for relevance (“school choice,” “ESA,” “voucher,” “parental rights,” “CRT,” “teacher union,” etc.), and rendering clean cards.

The process wasn’t headache-free, mind you. There were bugs to fix and there was a lot of troubleshooting. But, this is all relative. “A lot” compared to what? I had this up and running correctly with about 14 hours of effort. If I did it a second time, I’d cut that in half. A third round would make this about a 4 to 5 hour process, most likely. That’s just incredible. If I had outsourced this to a programmer, I would have spent at least 10 hours just communicating what I wanted, including the initial meetings, check-ins, and follow ups. Four hours more than that and I had a completed product. Keep in mind, however, that I had to take the time to do this. Often, it’s easier to hand it off to someone else, especially if you have absolutely no idea how to create a Git repo, or work through the backend of a WordPress site.

The result lives at efinstitute.org/education-news: a constantly updating feed of curated headlines, excerpts, and links that updates every thirty minutes, around the clock, seven days a week. Visitors scrolling for the latest on ESAs in Arizona or union pushes in California get the good stuff without wading through thousands of unrelated articles.

What struck me most wasn’t the speed (though building something functional in hours instead of weeks is wild). It was how vibe-coding lowered every barrier. As someone who’s spent years fighting for educational freedom, I know the power of tools that democratize access. This felt like that on a personal scale: no CS degree required, no budget for a dev team, just clear intent + a capable AI + iterative conversation.

If you’re an advocate, researcher, or parent tired of scattered news, try vibe-coding your own tool. Describe what you need plainly. Iterate until you get it working. The frontier models are ready to build with you—not just for you.

The quiet erosion of institutional trust in education won’t reverse through complaints alone. Sometimes it takes building small, honest alternatives that work. Thanks to Grok, efinstitute.org/education-news is one more brick in that wall—one that families can actually use at the kitchen table.

Matthew Nielsen is the Founder of the Educational Freedom Institute and author of Critical Condition: Destructive Ideologies in America’s Classrooms. The Education News aggregator at efinstitute.org/education-news was built in collaboration with Grok.