Coeur d’Alene is not a Silicon Valley-like hub of tech excellence. But vibeCDA took a step toward the city becoming a hotspot of AI literacy on day one of “vibe-athon” 

Participants were invited to the Innovation Collective on Friday, where vibeCDA hosted its first vibe-athon, inspired by hackathons where companies pay programmers and designers to create functional software or hardware prototypes.

The mission is to provide anyone, from first-timers to experienced developers, the opportunity to use vibe coding to build a playable game. It gives participants a fun, hands-on way to learn about vibe coding.

“If you say, ‘Hey, build a game,’ anyone can do that right away, then everybody has fun doing that because it's creative,” said Daniel Finley, organizer. “Then they come out of it like, ‘Holy moly! I can actually do a ton of stuff!’”

That “stuff” could be anything from building more games, creating a website or establishing tools to operate a business.

“The first adoption of technology historically has always been video games,” said co-host Jeff Spicer. “We have tons of software in the medical and military fields you can trace back to (the 1993 video game) Doom.

Vibe coding gives an open entry to coding without knowing how to code. Vibe coders describe what they want done in plain language, then a large language model, or LLM, takes the user’s input to generate the results.

The most important part is knowing how to properly instruct the AI to give users the results they seek.

“We want to teach people how to think big picture about what they're doing and also to have control over what they're doing,” co-host Conner Kees said. “It's actually not hard at all to have a good vocabulary for these things.”

Another co-host, Tom Vrba, compared not having the right vocabulary to a property developer knowing nothing about construction.

“That person's not going to be very effective at directing their workforce to do whatever needs to be done,” Vrba said. “It's really difficult to do if you have absolutely no idea what's going on under the hood or some basic understanding.”

Josiah Poling and Noah Marshall thought participating in the vibe-athon could help skills in their shared background of storytelling through film and video games.

“For me, it's getting a more well-rounded understanding of what I'm able to do personally with the AI tools,” Poling said. “I'm not sure I'm actually gonna make anything fun, but at least it'll be fun to do.”

Marshall was excited about the possibilities.

“I've taken a coding course here and there, but I don't have a huge background in actual programming,” Marshall said. “We can dream it, spread out our ideas and come to a concept really quickly. That's pretty exciting for me.”

VibeCDA plans to have similar events next year to connect builders, share ideas, develop talent locally and eventually incubate and grow Coeur d’Alene-based businesses.

“As it grows more, we want to work more closely with places like Elevate, KTEC, Gonzaga or Lake City High,” Finley said. “We want to get people in the mindset of ‘I don't need to be a consumer, I can be a creator, and I can make my life better in whichever way that I want.'”

    Noah Marshall and Josiah Poling share a laugh as they conceptualize their vibe coding created video game they'll build this weekend.
  

    Event co-host Tom Vrba explains how the weekend will go to participants of vibeCDA's first "vibe-athon" at the Innovation Collective in Coeur d'Alene.
  

    The crowd listens to event organizer Daniel Finley as he kicks off vibeCDA's first "vibe-athon."