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AI Programming

'Vibe Coder' Who Doesn't Know How to Code Keeps Winning Hackathons in San Francisco (sfstandard.com) 131

Posted by EditorDavid from the leader-bored dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard: About an hour into my meeting with the undisputed hackathon king of San Francisco, Rene Turcios asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I politely declined, but his offer hardly surprised me. Turcios has built a reputation as a cannabis-loving former professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player who resells Labubus out of his Tenderloin apartment when he's not busy attending nearly every hackathon happening in the city. Since 2023, Turcios, 29, has attended more than 200 events, where he's won cash, software credits, and clout. "I'm always hustling," he said.

The craziest part: he doesn't even know how to code.

"Rene is the original vibe coder," said RJ Moscardon, a friend and fellow hacker who watched Turcios win second place at his first-ever hackathon at the AGI House mansion in Hillsborough. "All the engineers with prestigious degrees scoffed at him at first. But now they're all doing exactly the same thing...." Turcios was vibe coding long before the technique had a name — and was looked down upon by longtime hackers for using AI. But as Tiger Woods once said, "Winning takes care of everything...."

Instead of vigorously coding until the deadline, he finished his projects hours early by getting AI to do the technical work for him. "I didn't write a single line of code," Turcios said of his first hackathon where he prompted ChatGPT using plain English to generate a program that can convert any song into a lo-fi version. When the organizers announced Turcios had won second place, he screamed in celebration.... "I realized that I could compete with people who have degrees and fancy jobs...."

Turcios is now known for being able to build anything quickly. Businesses reach out to him to contract out projects that would take software engineering teams weeks — and he delivers in hours. He's even started running workshops to teach non-technical groups and experienced software engineers how to get the most out of AI for coding.
"He grew up in Missouri to parents who worked in an international circus, taming bears and lions..."

'Vibe Coder' Who Doesn't Know How to Code Keeps Winning Hackathons in San Francisco More | Reply

'Vibe Coder' Who Doesn't Know How to Code Keeps Winning Hackathons in San Francisco

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  • I am not exactly sure how one would judge a winning entry either.

  • The writing is on the wall (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @07:48AM (#65500734) Homepage Journal

    I will still code by hand for fun. But the industry has changed. And everyday you will face increasing pressure to compete against people like him in your career.
    I see no way to pump the brakes on this. Let alone to reverse it.

  • Website (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @07:53AM (#65500746) Journal
    Here is his website [reneturcios.com]. Nice, (but the top menu bar is among the most irritating I've ever seen).

    Here is his code for the winning hackathon entry he made [replit.com]. It uses Gradio, which is a library I was unaware of, but looks interesting.

    His linkedin [linkedin.com] has the following skills listed:

    Deep Learning Neural Networks Machine Learning Python (Programming Language) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Science C++ Software Development Venture Capital Networking Pattern Recognition unreal engine Product Management TensorFlow PyTorch

  • You can do amazing things... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @07:59AM (#65500748) Homepage

    I met a guy a couple of weeks ago: he's a professional software PM, but doesn't himself know how to program. So he is presumably good with requirements, knows generally how software development works, etc..

    We live in a wine region, and he has an extensive wine cellar. He wanted an iOS app to keep track of what he has, what he thought of each bottle, etc.. Using a collection of various AIs (because sometimes one would get stuck), and over the course of 2-3 months, he gradually built an app. He showed it to me, and I can only say "wow". It's a lot more than a CRUD app - it includes features like import/export, like taking a picture of a label, automatically extracting text bits for dropdowns, so that you can manually choose which bit of text is the winery, which bit is the name of the wine, etc.. Very slick, very professional, very feature rich. A talented programmer could achieve the same thing in the same time frame. A mediocre programmer - no chance.

    Again, the guy understands the software development process. In some sense, he was treating the AIs like programmers, and directing them the way he directs a human team. But still - to create a professional quality app, fiddling around part-time for a couple of months? Without writing, or even correcting any code yourself? Wow.

    • Re:You can do amazing things... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:24AM (#65500782)

      But still - to create a professional quality app

      the game has indeed changed but i would take "professional quality" with a grain of salt in this context. yes, ai is an incredible boost to productivity, and an enabler for people without engineering knowledge, but an app isn't "professional" because of its looks or functionality. it also has to be secure, performant, maintainable, possibly scalable and interoperating.

      behind these new careers and any of these geniuses (whose genius i don't dispute for a second) you'll still need a few engineers in the background who actually understand how the stuff works in order for it to last and minimize the risk of it blowing up. for a while at least.

      on the flip side, pre ai era apps or even large scale applications made by entire teams of human professionals that have shown to be crap aren't a rarity either, so i'll take my grain of salt with a grain of salt.

      • ... but an app isn't "professional" because of its looks or functionality. it also has to be secure, performant, maintainable, possibly scalable and interoperating.

        So I take it you've never downloaded an iOS or Android app from a major company that was by definition "professional" and yet met none of your requirements?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by znrt ( 2424692 )

          so you didn't even read to the end of a 3 short paragraph post to make a redundant comment that only shows you cannot read and otherwise doesn't contribute anything? feeling better now?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      I met a guy a couple of weeks ago: he's a professional software PM, but doesn't himself know how to program.

      That's normal for PMs, minimal to no coding skills. That is not their job.

    • He wanted an iOS app to keep track of what he has, what he thought of each bottle, etc.

      So vivino?

      • it includes features like import/export, like taking a picture of a label, automatically extracting text bits for dropdowns, so that you can manually choose which bit of text is the winery, which bit is the name of the wine, etc..

        So exactly vivino

    • I was going to post a very similar comment: these people are not coders but they are project managers, and they are "employing" AI as their coding employees.

      The thing is - there's "nobody" to take credit for the work, so the manager gets credit for something they didn't do. So it's definitely a skill and is work, but it isn't "coding" at all.

      It's an interesting world - the AI is an extremely inexpensive employee and has enough skill to displace increasingly higher-skill tiers of actual software engineerin

    • . . . And secure? The first thing I think of when I hear a new wave of non-coders are about to create a bunch of public-facing tools and sites is that we're going to get the Internet-of-things style approach to security. Which is just plain ignoring it.

      These things connect end-users directly to code generation, so the loop to polish off the end-product to get it exactly how they want it to look and feel is real tight. But these people have no clue if something is secure or not. I had some guys paint m

    • What happens when one of the libraries that the AI used has a security vulnerability and another one is replaced with another library with a different API? Now you need to start from square one again?

  • shallow online footprint (Score:5, Interesting)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:03AM (#65500754) Homepage

    For such a rock star vibe coder his online footprint sure it shallow. No proof of his abilities or victories anywhere.

  • but is this winning? (Score:4, Informative)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:07AM (#65500756)

    'But as Tiger Woods once said, "Winning takes care of everything...."'

    Does winning by cheating take care of everything?

    Since when is using another coding source in a coding competition NOT cheating?

      "I realized that I could compete with people who have degrees and fancy jobs...."

    You're not competing, you're cheating the rules. The game is being invalidated by a tool, the cheater is not competing at all.

    "Turcios is now known for being able to build anything quickly."

    That is false, this guy can build nothing that GPT cannot already reconstruct. He admits he provides no coding capability on his own.

    • Does winning by cheating take care of everything?

      Cheating worked for Tom Brady.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evslin ( 612024 )

        But not for Barry Bonds, who has as many World Series championships and as much MLB hall of fame eligibility as you and I do.

    • Re:but is this winning? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:25AM (#65500894)

      'But as Tiger Woods once said, "Winning takes care of everything...."'

      Does winning by cheating take care of everything?

      Since when is using another coding source in a coding competition NOT cheating?

      I guess it depends on the rules to decide what is cheating. If the rules simply require delivering a product by a certain time, is using AI cheating any more than using a library to perform tasks instead of coding it yourself, or not coding in machine language? I get the concern that all of a sudden the skills developed over time are suddenly threatened by a tool that means someone without that expereince can compete effectively with you, but technology has done that to occupations forever.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by diesel66 ( 254283 )

      "Does winning by cheating take care of everything?" -The French at Crecy, regarding the English longbow.

      The drone warfare in Ukraine is eliciting similar reactions from infantrymen.

      The only rule: Win.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        During WWI, the Germans didn't like the USA handing their troops civilian weapons either.

    • Were you also mad at Kirk for cheating?

  • Indication of bad hackathon questions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @08:09AM (#65500758) Journal

    This would be similar to a Math Olympiads giving participants questions of multiplying 20-digits numbers. Or weight lifting in the Olympics where one contestant wore a powered exoskeleton to help lift the weight.

    It's no wonder in those cases a machine can do it better than humans, and it only demonstrated the poor level of organizers, that they were unable to come up with good worthy questions for the participants, rather than anything about such events itself.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This is not a triumph for vibe-"coding", but shows how badly these "Hackatons" have screwed up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

        Then the "hackatons" have always been screwed up - yet we have been celebrating their results for *years*.

        As far as I can tell the formats haven't changed.

        I think you're just jealous that someone doing vibe coding is doing soooo well in these competitions.

    • Even supposing the tasks were well-constructed and challenging, a hackathon by nature, is asking programmers to build a POC. That's the easy part of software development, and it's the part AI is good at.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      The more common or generic a task is, the more likely a machine learning system will be able to do it. Such contests do not exactly pick obscure or difficult concepts for people to implement, so not surprising that such a system would do well at it.

    • You put that as if LLMs could write better code faster than programmers, outside of contests.

      Sure, you don't bring a Lamborghini to run a marathon, because everyone already knows that cars run faster than athletes; that's why commuters are stuck in traffic for hours every day.

      Similarly, computing machinery has replaced human computers, because machines are faster and more precise. And autocode/compilers have replaced machine code programmers, for the same reason.

      So if you think we need a rule that prevents

  • Remember when "hand wrote html" users made fun of Frontpage and Dreamweaver users? And Visual Basic users? Then there were people who made games with tools like SEUCK, "The Game Factory" and Klik'n'Play.. In fact even "speedcoding" in the 1950s would probably been seen as "vibe coding" if they had that term in use at the time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Yeah. These coding assistants are just 4th generation programming languages with no documented spec. Prompts are just another programming language, but using an informal grammar that can change without warning... which also means there is a rather low ceiling of how good you can get at it.

    • Remember when "hand wrote html" users made fun of Frontpage and Dreamweaver users?

      No, I remember being confused why users would make things more difficult for themselves. HTML is just text, plain text with some mark-up here and there. Then it mutated into a collection of formal and semi-formal document formats. And now it appears to be simply the placeholder, generated by some framework or other, for a manifest for an Angular compiler.

      And Visual Basic users?

      I remember what Dijkstra said about Basic.
      And learning to keep logic and presentation separate.

      Game jams are not about clever code, but about originalit

  • The King will hear of him, and take him into his court soon. He's lucky to leave his unwashed friends behind.

    To be analytical about it, Yu-gi-oh is a fairly complex game requiring, analytical ability, planning, strategy. My kid beat me everytime I tried... then again, I wasn't nearly as interested or motivated as he was.

  • That says something about "Hackatons" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:06AM (#65500850)

    Not about "vibe coding". Oh, and real-world coding does not come with winning awards, but with requirements regarding reliability, usability, security, maintainability, regulatory compliance and some others.

    • Hackathons do bits and pieces of cool stuff.

      Typically they do the hard stuff.

      So yeah there is still going to be somebody to go look over the code and make sure it's functional and secure. But that person is going to be doing a hell of a lot less work.

      I think it's safe to say about half of White collar workers are going to be permanently unemployed within the next 5 years. If not sooner.

      That's going to hit blue collar workers like a truck. Because white collar workers higher blue color worker
    • Indeed, I would not trust a single thing he wrote to be production ready. Are all possible exceptions handled gracefully? Are edge cases incorporated? How do I back up and restore the data of the application without loss? Can I load balance it across multiple data centers internationally located? Does it properly record all authentication, authorization, and action for later audit? Is every resource access properly secured? Will it integrate into our SSO systems? Does it support closed source data stores? U

  • Coding? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Princeofcups ( 150855 ) <john@princeofcups.com> on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:21AM (#65500886) Homepage

    So "coding" is now assembling modules to spit out what you want. ..... That's not coding. The goal post hasn't moved, it's over in the next county. STOP PRETENDING THAT AI IS REAL. Slashdot readers (should) know better.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xack ( 5304745 )
      The clue is in the name assembly. You assemble text to represent binary code. Compilers are the next step up, followed by interpreters and scripts, and AI is just further up the abstraction pyramid.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        AI just replaces the formal grammar of 3rd generation languages with an informal english-like grammar of a 4th generation language. Which means unlike compilers or assemblers, it will always be unpredictable and non deterministic, which makes it differnt from those other two examples in a very important way.

    • assembling modules to spit out what you want. ..... That's not coding.

      We used to call that a "shell script".

    • >> "coding" is now assembling modules to spit out what you want

      Yes and it has been that way for a long time. Most programs have a list of imports at the top and the rest of the code uses the API of those packages to accomplish what you wanted. LLM's are familiar with those API's and can perform the assembly for you, a big time saver.

  • Single-functionality apps are easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:22AM (#65500888)

    So he's AI-built an app that takes some input, processes audio and spits out the result while having a fairly well-described win condition.

    This is entry-level shit.

    Now, go and show me how your AI skills fare in a multi-million lines codebases of a complex commercial system on a large team. An environment of competing priorities where you have to satisfy multivariate conditions (without compromise on any), support legacy systems while keeping the app readable and maintainable.

    • Not only that, but in a hackathon, contestants build a proof of concept. That's the easy, and smallest, part of building software. And it's the part AI is good at. Developing the POC into real software, takes 99% of the time and effort, and AI sucks at that part of the job.

      • Absolutely. A PoC is just the starting point, often used to convince the management to allocate resources, time and money to the idea. Then the actual graft begins.

        • often used to convince the management to allocate resources

          I have done exactly this, at my current job. I wrote a POC of a centralized SSO component using an OAuth flow, in three days. I then used that POC to get the company to embark on an actual project, which took a team of three, 5 months to complete. Everybody was happy, including management, because they could see what they were going to get. Nobody thought for a minute that it would be quick and easy.

  • Neat! (Score:3)

    by mukundajohnson ( 10427278 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:23AM (#65500890)

    No doubt LLMs can eliminate tedious parts of coding when building a tiny app. Hackathons seem like a good target.

    • No doubt LLMs can eliminate tedious parts of coding when building a tiny app. Hackathons seem like a good target.

      Depends on how you look at it.

      A hackathon allowing the use of AI/LLMs is measuring competitor skill about as well as a chess tournament is by allowing the use of engines.

      Hacking the hackathon, isn’t really self-serving. Kind of like robbing your own bank.

  • "No no, you don't get the reward" (Score:3)

    by DewDude ( 537374 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:27AM (#65500900) Homepage

    "Your AI does. It did the work. You just ordered it. But since we don't allow artificial participants, you'll get nothing and like it."

  • Maybe because "hacking" is not how real long-lasting code is written. Durable expandable maintainable code is not "hacked together" - it is engineered, which takes time - more than a day at a hackathon.
    • To the people paying the bills, professional or just barely works this quarter does not matter. The goal is to receive payment, everything else is a cost center in the way of getting payment.
      • Yes, in my experience you are right. Except in the domain of aerospace sometimes.
          • Yes indeed. When they abandoned their engineering culture, they abandoned their product and their customers.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            Boeing is going all in on AI tools. The entire software org is being pushed to put together plans for how they will using "Boeing AI' to decrease costs and increase output. I've been listening to people talk about how it made writing tests so much easier.. tests that are run on aircraft software for formal qualification... and these people are being richly rewarded by management, who have staked their career on AI....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jythie ( 914043 )
          Yeah, the FAA will not put up with AI nonsense, esp for things that require a certified compiler... but DoD? Their standards are a lot lower since troops can not sue for wrongful death.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by PPH ( 736903 )

            Yeah, the FAA will not put up with AI nonsense

            Not running onboard the plane. But the code running on the systems may very well be generated by AI. How would the FAA ever find out?

  • Power tools (Score:3)

    by evslin ( 612024 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @10:38AM (#65500976)

    > "All the engineers with prestigious degrees scoffed at him at first. But now they're all doing exactly the same thing...."

    Yeah, that's most peoples' reactions when they see that they can replace manual labour with a power tool.

    The 'real world' of software development does not involve spending 100% of your time shitting out prototypes and toy projects in a 48-hour timebox, so those engineers with prestigious degrees (and even the ones without prestigious degrees) are still going to be the ones called in to build the whole house while this nitwit is stuck making cutting boards and step stools out of kits using someone else's tools at the local woodworking shop.

  • Tech Dept (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ByTor-2112 ( 313205 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @11:07AM (#65501010)

    Anyone who hires this guy is instantly creating tech debt that will cost them more than a real application would have when it needs to be improved, updated or basically any modification.

    And imagine if you had to audit this thing.

  • What we need to be doing (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday July 06, 2025 @11:33AM (#65501048)
    I don't know normally talk about it because nobody here wants to hear it but just this ones I'll tell you guys what you need to be doing.

    First we need strong unions for higher wages for the remaining jobs so that those people can drive a service sector economy with their purchases.

    Next we need ludicrously high taxes on the rich in order to control their power and to get the resources we need.

    Then we need enormous government programs. Trillions and trillions of dollars of government infrastructure spending. Trillions more social programs. We also need single-payer healthcare and huge investment in education with literally everyone spending half their life in college and education. That keeps them out of the workforce which is going to be shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

    All this just buys us time. I've mentioned it on other comments but the problem we have is we are running out of work to do but we're still going to have some work that has to be done, typically unpleasant backbreaking work that pays very poorly with it requires a large number of well to do white collar workers to fund via service sector jobs

    The idea is to do all this to by time while we get used to a completely different society.

    Without all this the economy collapses you have literally billions unemployable, not unemployed unemployable, and eventually you've got massive wars and people firing nukes off.

    This was actually the plan Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had in store if you were paying attention...

    And we aren't going to do any of this. Because as soon as any of this money starts getting spent it's going to trigger the lizard brain of all the people reading this because some of you are still going to be working while other people are not because they are completely useless and you're going to want those useless people to suffer because you're suffering at your miserable job.

    So you will not allow any of this and we're not going to get the time we need to transition and we're going to do those wars instead.

    I don't think our species is going to survive any of this.

    • You're still here after all these years?

      Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to

      • you're making a critical mistake.

        You're mixing up matter transmutation with automation.

        We can still have lots of scarcity and little or no work.

        And that's before we talk about shit like the male loneliness epidemic and 20% of straight men completely unable to get female companionship

        The world is going to eat you alive now. But I guess your neck will be OK, since you've got that stuck in the ground.

        You do know ostriches don't really do that right?

  • "I didn't even have to take a programming class"
    (starts offering a vibe coding class)

  • Some hackathons exist to generate new ideas quickly, and I could see this being useful. But most game dev hackathons also exist for devs to build skills. I don't think there's much skill building happening here. And I doubt you could apply this to larger codebases. A little bit you have to wonder why ChatGPT spits out source code. Why not just spit out compiled machine code? Aside from the ubiquity of source code online for training data, wouldn't it be more efficient to produce compiled binaries? If

    • Perhaps the LLM "knows" that a compiled binary for an Android ARM does not run on iOS?
      Or gets eaten by your anti virus defender when the browser tries to display the hex code?

      You have a hex code plug in for your browser, right?

      Oh, you are on Edge on Windows? Nevermind...

  • I'm not sure what the hackathon rules say about slapping a search engine on top of Stack Overflow either. And that's basically what Turcios is doing. On one hand, I'm not sure if a 'smart' h.r. department at a software company hasn't caught on to this ploy during hiring interviews. (If such a thing as a smart h.r. department actually exists.) And refused a job offer.

    On the other hand, this _IS_ code reuse. Which many companies support.

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