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Demonstrating a return on investment from the many ed tech products districts use has become increasingly important as pushback against screens in classrooms advances, and as financial challenges mount amid enrollment declines.
At Peninsula School District in Washington, however, district administrators are beginning to find ways to use artificial intelligence to develop their own software that can replace some of the ed tech products currently in use.
Just a few months into this initiative of what is often described as “vibe coding,” the district expects to save up to $250,000 in canceled ed tech contracts alone by the 2026-27 school year, said Kris Hagel, the district’s chief information officer. The district has already identified three or four software subscription tools it will likely not renew, he added, including a workflow automation tool for its HR and finance departments known as Informed K12.
While vibe coding is unlikely to replace every ed tech product in the district, there are some tools that Hagel considers to be “low-hanging fruit,” ripe for being developed in-house.
Hagel said there’s ed tech that Peninsula School District has “purchased over the years that we’re now looking really critically at and saying, ‘Hey, you know, this is not really as complex as it looked like, and maybe we should take a look at what we can do internally and save money.’”
How does vibe coding work at the district level?
Vibe coding is a newer term coined and defined in 2025 by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy as a way to engage generative AI tools to build software by simply using text prompts to guide the AI to build code for an app. Hagel said his district uses a combination of vibe coding and “agentic software engineering.” That means a couple of people are more closely familiar and involved in the actual coding process, he said.
Several Peninsula district administrators — most of whom do not have a background in computer science — have $200 monthly subscriptions to Claude Code to develop their own software, Hagel said. Once those apps are created, he said, they function using the district’s own private generative AI system called AI Studio, which costs about $600 per month.
Peninsula’s AI Studio has data privacy and data processing agreements with three AI platforms: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Hagel said. Within the agreements, he added that these major AI cloud providers have to strip any personally identifiable information inputs sent to their systems from AI Studio. That allows the hundreds of staff actively using the platform to safely interact with the AI models without putting any sensitive data at risk of exposure to a third party.
In addition to replacing some ed tech products through vibe coding, Peninsula is also using AI to develop apps for new services it could never afford from an outside vendor, Hagel said.
Washington’s Peninsula School District recently used vibe coding to develop LessonLens, an artificial intelligence coaching app that evaluates and provides instructional feedback to teachers.
Permission granted by James Cantonwine / Peninsula School District
For example, James Cantonwine, director of research and assessment at Peninsula School District, saw there was a need for instructional coaches to give teachers interactive feedback in the classroom. To address this, he spent a couple of months developing LessonLens, an app that gives educators the capability to upload audio and video files of themselves teaching students. They then receive feedback from AI based on different instructional frameworks, Cantonwine said.
The AI can also guide teachers through a reflection process, he said. The app is secure and private to teachers as the district is unable to see who is using the tool or what information is being shared with LessonLens.
The district began a soft launch of the app two weeks ago, and it will not be required for teachers to use, Cantonwine said.
Moving forward, Cantonwine said he is working to develop more apps, including an AI-powered interactive dashboard to help streamline purchasing requests from teachers in the district’s career and technical education department.
Advice and caution
For districts looking to experiment with vibe coding, Cantonwine recommends that they first need to pick an AI coding app and then identify problems that a current ed tech contract is not solving, or that a potential tool offers but might not be worth investing in.
Hagel also advised district leaders to start playing with vibe coding tools safely by not using personally identifiable information just to test out the technology’s capabilities. Then as a district leader and their technology staff grow more comfortable with vibe coding, they can use it to roll out secure district-led apps.
“Just try and see what you can build,” Hagel said.
At the same time, he said, districts need to be careful. That’s why Peninsula is slowly allowing people to develop district apps through vibe coding.
“You can’t just throw up any old thing that AI writes for you,” Hagel said. “There’s got to be some vetting going on behind the scenes on that to make sure that it’s being done safely.”
When it comes to proving ed tech ROI, Cantonwine said Peninsula has previously struggled to do that with some of its own purchases and subscriptions.
“So we want to make sure that we’re being rigorous about that with the vibe coded solutions and with our own vendor purchase solutions, as well,” Cantonwine said.
