Vibe Coding Is Your New Superpower Turning Ideas Into Reality

Not just for professional developers, a new generation of tools allow anyone to express themselves in code.

You may have heard of the term "vibe coding," introduced by Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, famous for his fundamental contributions to modern artificial intelligence and more recently his wonderful videos that detail how large language models work.

Vibe coding is the ability to create computer programs just by speaking to an AI.

The latest generation of AI tools assisting programming goes way beyond what the equivalent in the world of WordPress processors would be spell-checking or word completion. Similarly to how you can ask ChatGPT to write a short story for you, it is now possible to tell the AI to write programming code. With the difference that the audience of a short story will be people, but the audience of the code is going to be another computer that will execute the code. It can be anything: a video game, a website, an application on your phone, things that people might even want to pay money for.

If you are a developer, you must immediately embrace it. You have everything you need in order to improve your productivity at least tenfold, but maybe even more. You know the concepts of the various languages and frameworks, what is version control and GitHub, how do databases work and environment variables, what are the options for hosting your code so that others can get access and many other things. Yes, it will be natural for a lot of developers to feel threatened by these new tools but they should realize that they are unstoppable and only by embracing them they can become even more valuable within their organizations or to their clients.

But what is truly amazing is that if you are not a developer but have the curiosity and the patience to get acquainted with the concepts that are listed above (and they are not harder than creating your Gmail account or adding your credentials to the App Store to download something), then you will gain real superpowers.

You can start by creating something very simple - a to-do list, a puzzle game like 2048 or Tetris. Gain the satisfaction of seeing that what you created really works, and possibly go further experimenting with the fast implementation of more complex ideas.

And by fast I mean practically immediate! If you accept the digital world to be for a computer as real as the physical world is for us, then you are creating with your words, like a magician, empowered by the tools giving you the type of support that will overcome the limits of your technical knowledge.

So much of what we do today and for so many of us is mediated by digital communications, by a computer or smartphone, that the ability to actively participate in this not only as a user or a country contributor of content but expressing your ideas in code that is executed on your machine or others smartphones potentially millions of computers all over the world is truly exhilarating.

There are very important implications.

With the increasing power of our tools we can go from idea to action seamlessly. This allows us to explore infinite opportunities, iterating at greater speeds towards desired outcomes producing unbounded total value.

This is a process that feeds on itself as we develop the tools we experiment more rapidly finding what ideas work and what ideas do not work new ideas become new tools even more powerful than before and so on if you add to this the ability to analyze and implement ideas with the help of ai including the algorithms that the ai itself is based on well something truly astonishing can result.

We are now seeing technologies, such as AI, whose performance not only accelerates but does so at an increasing rate. Unlike steady exponential growth with fixed doubling periods, they exhibit progressively shortening doubling times. This creates super-exponential growth patterns where improvement cycles continuously compress, potentially leading to explosive advancement when iteration-to-feedback loops approach zero latency. I call this the Paradigm of Jolting Technologies.

It is a privilege to be able to get your hands dirty and to participate actively in this profound transformation. Using the tools propels you to a world rapidly approaching, transformed by advanced AI. The very nature of Jolting Technologies with variable rates of acceleration is such that exactly forecasting how complex interactive interacting phenomena will generate outcomes that we want to influence embrace is hard or close to impossible. But we must equip ourselves the best we can familiarizing ourselves with the phenomena taking advantage of the tools that become available and riding the change that is unstoppable coming.

Here are a few starting points if you feel ready to experiment. You can start by creating a description of your idea. This gives guidance to the tool and often it is useful so that you know what is being created will correspond to what you have in mind. A great platform for this is called CodeGuide

The most advanced development tools have just become available. One of the best ones as of today is Windsurf. Don't feel threatened by its interface - on one side it shows you files and folders, in the middle the particular component of the program being worked on, and on the right side you will have your conversation with the AI.

At the beginning you can run your experiments on your own computer. When you get ready to share it with the world, a great combination is using Supabase as a database to store your data, Github to store your code, and Vercel to host the running application.

Good luck with your vibe coding, and let me know what ideas you implemented and if you are having fun!