I was stuck. So I started to vibecode.
Six years in the same job, burned out and stuck — then a podcast on a train to Basel. Five days later, with zero coding experience, I had a game.
Published:
On a train from Strasbourg
After 6 years in my current position I started to feel stuck. Doing the same tasks again and again, struggling with corporate structure, feeling the greed that drives everything around you… it sucks the energy from your body like a hungry vampire who just woke from torpor. I was looking for some impulse that would spark the joy of work in me again. And that spark came in the most unlikely way. From AI.
I was sitting on a train, going home from a customer visit, listening to podcasts. And again the urgent message came to me, this time from some kind of successful businessman riding the current AI wave. “AI is here and it will stay. You learn or you vanish!” I’m personally not that skeptical, but my experience with AI has been getting deeper in recent months and I kinda liked the vibe it gave me. I use AI to discuss different concepts, ask it to explain things, and the results I’ve been getting lately have been much better than in the beginning. “Is this the right time to get serious about it?” I asked myself.
And there, on the packed train between Strasbourg and Basel, I made a decision. “Let’s kick your AI skills and try the vibecoding trend.” To be honest I was very skeptical at first. I understood that AI can generate code, but in my head it was a tool for senior developers who know what they are doing. Something to help them be more effective in their work. I wasn’t sure how it could let me build something useful or interesting when I have zero coding knowledge. But I decided to invest and really dedicate the time to cracking into it. So I opened a new chat with Gemini and laid my fingers on the keyboard.
Vibecode that shit
I had a simple idea — let’s make a story game. Our world is full of hassle, stress and burnout, so let’s make it a positive, calming, healing game that helps the player wind down, calm their mind, and maybe fall asleep. Simple concept with one catch. Everything needs to be generated by AI.
I used Gemini Pro 3.1. It’s a model for “advanced math and code,” which seemed fitting. Together we tackled the basics of the development stack I should use, and after a few prompts I had installed Fedora 43 in a virtual machine and put good old VS Code on it. As the game was meant for mobile phones, Gemini suggested Flutter as the SDK, which I blindly accepted. Trust the process, right?
The work after that was mainly prompting Gemini and copy-pasting code into VS Code. It worked really well. Sometimes I had to push a little bit, asking for the whole page of code instead of just a snippet (which I didn’t know exactly where to paste); sometimes we had to take a step back to fix bugs, bad syntax, or misplaced brackets — but the experience was very positive. We also worked together on picking tools for generating pictures, soundtrack, and sound effects.
One side note — prompt the AI to ask additional questions. Don’t just let it spit out code and go silent. With questions it can guide you through things you forgot you wanted to build, and it can give you a lot of new ideas too. Don’t underestimate the power of questions.
It’s still not the writer
The most impressive part was working with the text. As the game is an interactive novel, I had to generate a lot of text. One of the main features is making low-stakes choices to direct the story, which Gemini handled pretty well. The same went for translations into different languages and updating the existing code with the translated text. The work Gemini did was almost perfect.
I had to proofread all the texts the AI generated, especially the translations. I had to fix a lot of things — sometimes remove sentences, or change the meaning of an expression to make it more fitting and natural. So, in my opinion, AI can generate code, but it’s not a writer or copywriter. You folks are safe.
I have a game now
It took me just five days to finish the game. From zero coding knowledge to a fully presentable product. Is the game perfect? Probably not. Is the work you can do with AI impressive? Absolutely yes. Can anybody do it? Definitely. What do you think?