A Pretty Decent Proposal

Hello everyone!

If you are subscribed to LessMad, or follow me on Twitter/X, then you already know that I’ve been ambushed by a rowdy and excited crowd of crypto-investors who made a crypto-coin out of my VibeKoder program.

I imagine that I’m straddling a few very different communities right now. I’ve had followers who enjoy my deep studies of McLuhan and histories of computing. I have other followers who like my journeys into mental health, healing, and sanity on LessMad.

And now I’ve got swarms of new followers who sense that I’ve got something of value and are spamming my twitter handle and trying to meme my coin all over Twitter.

I knew practically nothing about this world until a few days ago. I think that my posting about it has pissed off a lot of my old followers, who assume I’m now selling out. I also think that my new followers have no idea who I am or what I’m all about.

Also, while I’ve written a lot about computers, I’ve always felt ashamed of my lack of programming prowess. I never talk about my projects because I have not ever had faith in them. I’ve hidden my interest in making software for years. So, suddenly sharing it now, I still feel much like an imposter. And relying on LLMs for the heavy-lifting de-legitimates me in many ways among the programming crowd.

So let me compose a few words here to let everyone know where I stand.

This is Gambling

Before I start my story, I’d like to share the most confusing part of all of this first.

Here is where I stand right now: if you are not into crypto investing, do not start. I don’t want you to buy into my coin, and I am not writing this as an advertisement to hype my coin. Paradoxically though: if my coin goes up, I don’t want you to hate me telling you not to  learn crypto and so that you could buy by coin now while it is low.

I am on a career path to become certified as an addictions counselor. I have already talked with a client about their crypto-investing habit. Gambling is quickly becoming a mental health epidemic. Literally half of the working-age Filipinos are gambling on gambling apps.

So on what ethical basis could I be participating in any of this now? My leads are pretty slim at the moment. As someone who wears many hats, this is an excellent crash course on a new technology and a new online culture which is largely misunderstood or ignored in the mainstream. Also, given the fact that people are already gambling on everything under the sun, being an active player in the people who gamble on me seems inconsequential. It’ll happen regardless. Furthermore, I am very clearly signalling that I have strong beliefs and plans which pre-existed this emergent event, and that I have no intention of warping or going against those beliefs to help move a make-believe stock-ticker.

I hope that anyone who is reading this from the crypto investor community who thinks they are at risk of ruining their finances with gambling seek help. Never risk what you can’t afford to lose. Be a responsible adult, everyone.

If my saying any of this upfront dampens the growth of my coin, then so be it. I didn’t ask anybody to put their money into this. On top of that, I now have an interest in the $VibeKoder coin’s future too. The largest, actually.

It Could Be Worse

A few days ago, prolific Substacker Worst Boyfriend Ever launched a meme coin and then tried to rug-pull it two hours later, netting a quick $30,000.

The coin apparently quickly recovered and is now trading for prices higher than he cashed it out at and all the replies are making fun of him.

When my coin was made late Monday evening, I became beneficiary to some royalties. Since it was basically free cypto, I decided, on a lark, to reinvest a significant portion back into the coin. When the coin failed to explode into popularity at 4am on Tuesday morning (no, seriously), a bunch of early big buys cashed out and I ended up the largest stakeholder in my own coin.

This is terrifying to crypto investors. They worry that I’ll hype myself to get big and then, like WBE did, cash out without any regard for them.

At the advice of denizens of my new $VibeKoder community, I have chosen to use the “smart contract” feature of the Solana blockchain to lock ¾ of my invested funds until Valentine’s Day. I cannot arbitrarily sell all my coins before that date, and as that date comes up we’ll see where we’re at and strategize.

Why Me?

All started because somebody noticed my little desktop computer program VibeKoder. I think they just liked the name.

I know a lot about software development, but I’ve never invested the time in anything long enough to make it worthy of release or talking about. I coded in university, but never made it a full time occupation or hobby. So I’ve a real inferiority complex comparing myself to the real programmers whose work I benefit from and respect in the Free Software world. I check development blogs, change notes, etc. I’m on Hacker News and Slashdot and Phoronix and the KDE Planet blog aggregator nearly daily, and have been checking some of these sites for nearly 20 years!

For the past year I’ve been working on various personal software projects with the help of LLMs to accelerate things and make it more fun for me. My main goal for the past year has been to create a super-powered calendar application with integrated life-planning skills. I’ve had to start over six times, and have learned many lessons every iteration. I told the story of those months of rocky development in a recent live-stream, the pertinent ten minutes of which you can watch here.

Using LLMs to code has been amazingly fun. It’s truly amazing—I can liken it to playing a Sim game, something titled Software Tycoon, where you get to be a Steve Jobs clone and scream at your grovelling development team to make the product better! Faster! More efficient! Only, at the end, you get actual, functioning software.

Hacking on my calendar program, I didn’t like the IDE integrations for AI that were available at the time. IDE, if you didn’t know, stands for integrated development environment—basically a workshop of powertools for programmers. None of the LLM plugins actually showed me what was going on under the surface of the “friendly” chat interface, which drove me crazy.

What I tried to do instead, then, was use LLMs manually, copying and pasting code directly out of the web browser. But I also hate running apps in web browsers. So I looked desktop apps for using LLMs, and everything I found was either web-tech bundled with its own integrated web-browser (!) or janky, ugly and bloated pieces of crap!

So I made VibeKoder, which is tiny and super fast and made like a *real* computer desktop application, with C++. I finished it just enough for it be useful, and then I used to to work on the calendar app.

And about five days ago, I decided to re-test the water of commercial offerings and tried out Claude Code. It’s much different than the IDE integrations I found before, and I realized it automated a lot of the planning work I had learned to do myself over the past year. This meant that I could follow everything it was doing, including interrupt it and critique it, while still otherwise sitting back and letting it work for me.

In The Palm of My Hand

After the coin blew up, I realized that I didn’t have nearly as much to show for my efforts as my invested bolsters were claiming. The crypto guys were spamming “this dev SHIPS!” all over twitter/X. Meanwhile, what I had public on my GitHub (basically a portfolio of open source and free software code for developers) was extremely lackluster. I was far too embarrased of my half-finished personal projects to have made anything public. And I also knew that I had to have something public soon!

So I got to work on a new project: a program to sync my Palm Pilot with my desktop computer.

Within 48 hours I released a fully functional desktop program that does about 80% of the basic tasks necessary to make the Palm a useful device. It will sync your calendars from the cloud and, with a bit of tinkering, allow bi-directional syncing of changes. It will store all your contacts and sync memos. And install programs.

I shared this around some Palm enthusiest communities, and so far the response has been dismissal. My software works and is well tested. But, since I used AI, the first reaction has been to assume that it was “vibe coded” junk. After all—am I not the subject of the VibeKoder coin?

Being the VibeKoder

The coin was made after a neat, half-finished toy that I’ve already wrote about extensively on LessMad. My software is called VibeKoder, so now I sort of am the VibeKoder.

When people hear that software was vibe coded, they assume it was made by someone with no direct experience with the intricacies of software development. That is very, very dangerous. Like, civilizationally dangerous. Boardrooms full of clueless executives are already sold busted, broken, half-backed software “solutions” written by people with glossy pamphlets and PowerPoints every day. Now that software can be even more broken. The people selling it can be even more unscrupulous.

And yet, the inverse is true. I truly believe that LLM coding agents, when supervised by knowing and careful designers—as I am striving to learn to become—can empower individuals in fantastic ways. As I wrote last March,

If the medium is the message, and if my computer is shaping my identity and my life, then I’m going to damn-well try my hardest to be in control of the design and implementation of that software. And, three weeks ago, I realized that LLM coding, done properly, could actually deliver that control into my hands.

My dad has had a wall calendar hanging in his office and filed-papers and sticky notes for my entire life. He has a system for keeping track of his time and his life. Today, kids are brought in a world where they’re told to buy some commercial app on their phone to track their habits or otherwise manage the fundamentals of their lives.

I think that the reliance and general use of these tools are the primary causes of major problems which end up getting medically pathologized with various diagnoses like ADHD. We are literally training ourselves to exist outside of our bodies, in a non-physical world called cyberspace. I’ve written extensively about how children are growing up dissociated from their bodies, thanks to hijacking of the natural Piagetian development of object permanence by OOP on this very website. If you don’t know me or what I’ve been doing the past decade, then please enjoy all the stuff here! The Notable Media page is a good place to start.

We aren’t going to put the phones down, or turn off the screens for good. Therefore, we have to take control over our own personal machines back from the companies who program them for us. That’s why I release all my software as GPLv3. If you don’t know that means, let me tell you. It means that I am opening myself up for litigation. I’m saying to you, the user of my software, “Hey! thanks for trusting my program to run on your computer. If I fail to give you all the source code too, so that you have total knowledge and control over your own machine, please sue me.”

I have many more writings on this in the works—the problem is that they are all threatening to become book length. So, like my calendar program, I keep starting them over.

And That’s The Last Word

So I am now getting some residual funds from this coin that crypto people made to bet on me and my work. This has been a blessing, and I am grateful for the recognition. I have enjoyed a renewed excitement for my programming, and I feel very good learning to cast off the shame of having not been a proper programmer in past years.

Everything is moving toward automation of code. As this happens, it’s important to keep humans in the loop, and to continue to understand what these AIs are doing.

I’m proud of my software, and I will no longer let anyone make me feel inferior for having enjoyed the pleasure of automating parts of it—just like I don’t care about using jars of minced garlic in my cooking.

This will, hopefully, be a thorough-enough introduction to my work, my general story, and my intentions with this funny crypto coin thing that happened to me earlier this week. I’d still love to talk on-camera to anyone with more questions. So hit me up! And otherwise, let us have a blessed and safe 2026 together.