When the impossible becomes inevitable
Technical laymen are approaching their heyday
My first taste of coding showed up late to the party and pulled an Irish goodbye.
It was the fall of 2017 and I had just declared design as my major at Seattle University. Despite leading a busy double life as a student athlete and aspiring bedroom producer, I wanted to challenge myself to find a minor that would compliment my degree. As I browsed the course catalogue, computer science quickly stood out as a promising option.
The more I thought about it, the more the vision crystalized in my head: an artfully discerning, technically-proficient craftsman equipped with all the tools and lingo needed to pixel-push his way to eternal glory. Sounds pretty good, right?
Much to my surprise, my guidance counselor wasn’t so sure. I bounced into his office full of enthusiasm, but I was soon met with a concerned look.
“Have you ever coded before?” he asked. “Our computer science courses are difficult and time-consuming, are you sure you’ll be able to balance this with design and baseball?”
I’ve always leaned blindly deterministic, so it didn’t take long to convince him (read: myself) that I was up to the task.
The only issue was that the intro course had to be paired with calculus and I hadn’t attempted a math problem since junior year of high school. So, naturally, I had a competent friend take the online placement exam for me. A true stroke of genius. I ended up lasting about a month in CS101 before returning to my counselor with my tail tucked and a philosophy alternative in mind. Hello, Reality!
Despite all the quality one-on-one time with Nietzsche, I’ve always looked back on this choice with regret. I can’t claim to be a life-long computer nerd or an avid gamer, but I’ve always felt an undeniable pull towards technology. The allure of endless creative potential speaks to me deeply, but the steep technical language barrier has a way of making one feel like a perpetual outsider looking in.
Enter LLM’s.
I’m disappointed to admit that I have no recollection of my first time using ChatGPT. I do have faint memories of listening to Lex Fridman talk about this thing called “AI”, reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, and soon after stumbling upon a job posting at a startup incubator in Orange County. This was back in late 2023 when I was still living in Seattle.
Fast forward nearly 2 years and I’m having full-blown conversations with ChatGPT on my mid-day walks, only to return to my desk and proceed designing alongside Claude, Midjourney, and any other AI tool I can rationalize spending $20 a month on. I suspect this evolution will continue to feel like an enchanting fever dream, but there’s one chapter of the story I recall with more clarity: my first time vibe coding.
Like many, I began my journey with AI using it mostly as a substitute for search. I found it exciting and helpful, but that was about it. It was a utility. At this point I wasn’t able to feel the larger shift taking place, but it was only a matter of time and tinkering.
Weekends slowly transitioned from days full of recording music to an even split between music and AI exploration. Building custom GPT’s became a source of joy and astonishment. Meta prompting became a bottomless toolbox for extending curiosity. I began to realize that this technology was not only shaping my creative interests, but also changing the way I interfaced with the world.
It’s one thing for an LLM to summarize text or answer a question, but it’s another thing entirely for it to grant you the power to do something you never thought possible.
My first taste of this came on April 16th, 2025. This day marked the release of o3, OpenAI’s industry-topping model that pairs multimodal capabilities with advanced reasoning. In mortal tongue, that means it’s good at analyzing images and it thinks things through before responding. As I sat there and watched the livestream release, I quickly realized this was a game changer. I had a number of ideas for small software-based projects, but none had been acted on outside of some URL purchases. The time was now.
As soon as I got home from work I opened up a new GPT project and wrote a set of instructions for o3. I crowned it my technical co-founder and had it draft a business outline, propose a tech-stack, and create a series of sprint plans to get the ball rolling. Within two days I managed to whip up a decent UI, connect it to a database, deploy a working sign-up flow, and in the process uncover a newfound appreciation for what’s possible in this emerging AI world.
It wasn’t long after that I was up to 200,000 daily active users and investors were blowing up my inbox like I had just invented fire. Life itself began to transform into a wondrously complex vortex of ...
Okay this isn’t one of those stories, at least not yet. My idea wasn’t very strong and I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to build a system I didn’t understand. But the outcome of that project isn’t the point. The larger takeaway is that I was able to do something I never thought possible without a proper engineering skillset.
To say this was exhilarating would be a massive understatement. Here I am, a mere designer with no technical knowledge, building functional prototypes with little more than plain english and a healthy dose of persistence. My code-fluent friends couldn’t believe it!
What’s important to understand is that vibe coding is only going to get easier for us technical laymen. Its been four months since o3’s release and we’ve already seen new products like Base44 go viral with the promise of delivering software-based superpowers to anyone with an idea and a keyboard.
But while these products are growing rapidly in popularity, most users are living within the confines of what’s been possible up until now. Analytics dashboards, onboarding flows, and many other creations with familiar faces are being generated by the minute. Don’t get me wrong, this ability is incredible, but the output itself is not necessarily new or paradigm shifting.
In last week’s post, I talked about how Plicity is interested in exploring the edges of what a new type of content could look and feel like. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that humans always find ways to surpass expectations when they’re exposed to a new medium to work within.
Software itself certainly isn’t a new medium, but its always had an exceedingly high barrier to entry. This reality is changing rapidly and we’re eager to see where the collective mind takes things from here.
Until next week. 🤘🏼