Vibecoding is the Answer to Make Your Dreams a Reality
I Know Because I Did It
There are few things in life where you can immediately realize the implications of a new technology for our society. Social media. The smartphone. Generative AI. I’m calling it here and now: Vibecoding is going to change the world.
Let’s start with some background: “Vibecoding” is the idea of using an AI model to write code based purely on plain-language prompts, where the user can tell the AI to build, edit, and debug code. As the name suggests, it’s coding on vibes, bro.
While this capability was raised as a possibility since generative AI came on the scene, it’s only in the past few months that insiders have started saying that AI models are so good now that they can be trusted to write real, deployable code, though with iterative human feedback.
I learned all this on an episode of The Daily, where New York Times reporter Kevin Roose talked about how he Vibecoded an app to take a picture of his refrigerator and have it generate meal ideas for his son’s lunch. He also built a website during the interview. I was impressed.
This podcast got me thinking: If Kevin Roose can build a whole-ass app, what could I do? As a technology journalist he is clearly tech savvy, but he also states that he is not a programmer. Could I build something too?
Let me give myself some credit here, I think I’m pretty good with technology. I’m a millennial who grew up on computers, and not to brag but I’ve had more than one older family member ask me for tech support. I’m about as strong of a user of Microsoft Excel as anyone I’ve ever met, and I can write some basic SQL queries to extract data when needed (Select * anyone?). I’ve also worked as an IT Project Manager at points in my career so I’m familiar with a lot of terminology, and I’ve embraced AI in my life for everything from approximating recipes to analyzing health data to resume support and more.
But I am NOT a programmer. I’ve never written a line of Python, or HTML, or C++. Are there other major programming languages I’m missing? Probably - I wouldn’t know.
Something else to know about me (that I promise is relevant): I love Chess. I loved playing as a kid, then stopped completely for about 20 years until COVID when its popularity came roaring back into the mainstream. I opened a Chess.com account shortly thereafter and have played ever since.
An interesting fact about Chess (that again, I promise is relevant) is that everything is visible to everyone. It’s not poker where you are playing the odds against your opponent; everything is right there, on the board. And yet whenever I play, I inevitably miss an obvious attack, which I don’t realize until after I’ve lost my Queen. For the non-chess players, that’s the strongest piece on the board.
So back to Vibecoding. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if could build a Google Chrome extension to draw arrows and boxes to show me all the attacking moves that are already on a Chess.com board? My goal was to visualize what is plainly there for all to see so that I could improve my awareness. I actually tried to do this with ChatGPT, but couldn’t get it to function, as the constant debugging process was time consuming and frustrating. Could Vibecoding be the answer?
So I dove in. The process was fairly straightforward, which basically entails setting up a tool that lets AI run commands on the Windows Terminal of your computer. I used ChatGPT to tell me how to do this.
In two days, I built Knight Vision for Chess.com:
This Chrome Extension overlays on Chess.com to show all the attacking pieces, all the squares where you can put the opponent in check, all the defending pieces, and all the legal moves each piece can make. See all those blue, purple and red arrows? Those are created by my extension after it reads the chess board. You can also toggle these features on/off in a hideable user interface.
Two days. Zero programming experience. I can’t stress how much I couldn’t do this without Vibecoding. You could have offered me $1,000,000 to build this myself in a month and I would have failed.
Is building a Google Chrome extension for an online board game the most impressive feat ever accomplished? Sadly, no, but if you’re caught up on WHAT I built instead of the fact THAT I built it, then you’re missing the point. I Vibecoded over 3,000 lines of functioning, deployable code, in two days, with exactly zero programming experience.
This is, quite frankly, incredible. The power that any reasonably intelligent, driven, and creative person now has at their fingertips is beyond anything that humanity has ever seen. If you ever thought to yourself that you want to BUILD something, that you’re tired of doing knowledge work all day with nothing to show for your efforts, that if only you had the programming skills to turn your dreams into a reality, this is your answer.
You can do what I did. Today. Right now. You can build the business of your dreams. You can solve the problem that you wish someone would solve. You can build passive income streams and unshackle yourself from the need for employment. Never before has the world been more ready for the taking, if only you would reach out and grab it.
This is the sign you’ve been waiting for. Vibecoding is your answer. Go change the world.
If you like Chess and want to see for yourself how my extension works, feel free to download it here. I’m working on expanding my extension so that it works on Lichess.com, another popular chess website. And I’ve got more than one idea about what I am going to build next.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/knight-vision-for-chessco/mkaehnfakenhhnlccjdmhapboeljedlm