Speaking things into existence

Influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote two years ago that “the hottest new programming language is English,” a topic he expanded on last month with the idea of “vibecoding” a practice where you just ask an AI to create something for you, giving it feedback as it goes. I think the implications of this approach are much wider than coding, but I wanted to start by doing some vibecoding myself.

I decided to give it a try using Anthropic’s new Claude Code agent, which gives the Claude Sonnet 3.7 LLM the ability to manipulate files on your computer and use the internet. Actually, I needed AI help before I could even use Claude Code. I can only code in a few very specific programming languages (mostly used in statistics) and have no experience at all with Linux machines. Yet Claude Code only runs in Linux. Fortunately, Claude told me how to handle my problems, so after some vibetroubleshooting (seriously, if you haven’t used AI for technical support, you should) I was able to set up Claude Code.

Time to vibecode. The very first thing I typed into Claude Code was: “make a 3D game where I can place buildings of various designs and then drive through the town i create.” That was it, grammar and spelling issues included. I got a working application (Claude helpfully launched it in my browser for me) about four minutes later, with no further input from me. You can see the results in the video below.

It was pretty neat, but a little boring, so I wrote: hmmm its all a little boring (also sometimes the larger buildings don't place properly). Maybe I control a firetruck and I need to put out fires in buildings? We could add traffic and stuff.

A couple minutes later, it made my car into a fire truck, added traffic, and made it so houses burst into flame. Now we were getting somewhere, but there were still things to fix. I gave Claude feedback: looking better, but the firetruck changes appearance when moving (wheels suddenly appear) and there is no issue with traffic or any challenge, also fires don't spread and everything looks very 1980s, make it all so much better.

After seeing the results, I gave it a fourth, and final, command as a series of three questions: can i reset the board? can you