I found a complete program that GPT wrote for me, more than two years ago.

I found the first experiment I did in which GPT wrote all the code for me –something that now could be considered a form of “vibe coding.” The file is from April 16, 2023, and I think it’s impressive that we could do this at that time.

I asked GPT to write a program showing the phases of the moon. I wanted to show child0, in a very simple way, why we see the moon in different phases. I remember clearly that it took me slightly less than an hour to get the code I wanted. Days before this experiment, I had been trying to make GPT write the code for me using matplotlib, but it failed miserably. This time, I just described what I wanted, and it surprised me with the approach: instead of using a 2D visualization, it used a 3D one. That small change made the program simpler! Basically, it was a matter of adding a light source representing the sun, and two spheres representing the Earth and the Moon. The Earth is fixed, and the Moon rotates around it, showing its different phases depending on its position relative to the Earth and the Sun. It was very easy for GPT to add another camera on the surface of the Earth, always pointing at the Moon, so that we could see the phases of the Moon from the perspective of an observer on Earth.

This was one of the first times I felt that, with GPT, I could do things I hadn’t been able to before. Also, the germ of a realization appeared then, and has only grown since: using LLMs in this way to generate code felt like a step toward realizing the early Smalltalkers’ vision of what computing and programming could be use for. Without further ado, the visualization: