Winning with Code Without Coding

The first time I tried to build something like ThrillPractice was in 2013. I was in San Francisco. If you had seen me then, I was curled in a fetal position on the floor under a table in the Twitter cafeteria, my face full of terror.

I was at the #ComedyHackDay SF event, a hackathon located at the Twitter headquarters and put on by Cultivated Wit. A former classmate from Harvard, Baratunde Thurston , was running it. Hackathons are usually fueled by engineers who stay up all night writing code for glory. And then Angel Inokon entered the scene: a dark and bubbly woman with sparkly eyes and a dream. As a Product Manager, I knew my superpower was providing the vision and process that bring people together to build great things, but I also knew I couldn’t really code.

Let me illustrate that second point.

Flashback to CS50

As other teams worked around me, I had flashbacks to being a freshman in the computer science lab at Harvard. I was sitting there near midnight, trying to debug my CS50 code, while two young guys next to me were already finished—they were just refactoring theirs to be more elegant. It was in that moment I first felt like I wasn't a programmer. Yet, I never gave up the dream of creating software. I got my first job out of college at IBM and spent the next 14 years working at software companies.

Back to Twitter...

I was at 2 AM, hiding under the table—not perceptively sleeping, but truly hiding. All the buzz of being in the Twitter HQ was gone. My hopes were dashed by a text. My code, running on tools like grunt, node, and ruby, was not working due to what was probably some undocumented feature. The hackathon staff had left. Then came the ultimate buzz-kill: a text from my hackathon engineer, Josh, saying he wasn't coming back.

I had arrived ready to create a mobile dance app called Zombie Dancer—a flash mob learning tool for the annual Michael Jackson Thriller event. I believed through dance we could come together and heal the world. I was alone until "Josh" showed up. We pivoted to a web-app and were humming along. Until the text arrived:

Sorry, I am not coming back. I won't be able to help you.

I pecked at my laptop for hours, knowing enough programming to be literate but not enough to finish. I could have left, but I wouldn't. I had a winning idea—it had zombies! So under that table at Twitter headquarters, I went to sleep with a prayer and the belief that when I woke up, the code would work.

I woke up. The code was still not working.

Thirty minutes before showtime, an angel showed up. A hackathon helper named "Mike" spotted the bug and fixed it. I went on stage in my velvet purple jacket and dark jeans, alone, in front of a 300-person audience. I gave my opening pitch, and the audience roared with laughter. I did a little Thriller dance and had their hearts and attention. Then I showed my solution, and it worked. The judges later said they had to give me the third-place prize, and that is how I won a hackathon without coding.

My prize was a year of GitHub, 20,000 MailChimp credits, and an expensive bottle of brandy, which I gladly gave to Mike as a thank you. My true prize was the validation of my dream and a never-give-up spirit.

I never forgot the feeling of being the winning loser. The investors I approached told me, "There isn't really money in a mobile app for dance," right as ByteDance—the precursor to TikTok—was being born. Twelve years later, after being sidelined by my mystery diagnosis, I am alone again, unable to see my dance idea through.

But this time, I have a team: Cursor, Lovable, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT .

Thanks to these tools, I was able to build ThrillPractice with a level of excellence I can be proud of. They gave me my confidence back. They reminded me that I still knew how to write a spec, wireframe, and manage deployments. That knowledge was all there. No matter what the last ten years have been like—watching my peers move on in life and not knowing what would happen to me—I was finally able to accomplish something. For once, I don't feel like a loser.

A HEARTFELT THANK YOU

I wrote this with tears in my eyes, but the next few posts will be about everything I learned about AI programming. Is it truly vibe coding? In the next installment, we'll dive into my "50 First Dates with AI Programming."

Apologies in advance for the vicious outtakes, tongue-in-cheek satire, and downright raunchy overtones that will be appearing in the next posts as we discuss my "50 First Dates with AI Programming."

Angel Inokon is a Harvard and Stanford grad and technologist living in Northern California. Creator of Thrillpractice.com a tool to learn Thriller dance for the Thrill the World event. Names were changed to protect the innocent.