Yep, that’s right, we’re hosting a vibecoding event.
Why? In short, because there’s lots of experimentation happening, and we want to help it coalesce into purposeful, useful tools that lots of people and organizations can use.
We're seeing two distinct streams of vibecoding in civic tech right now.
One stream is people reinventing the wheel or duplicating the last decade-plus of civic tech tools with perhaps little idea of what’s already there, or why those exact products didn't work before.
There’s enthusiasm, but it’s redundant and can also exacerbate the already diffuse nature of the civic tech space, without actually adding anything, making it difficult to consolidate around and propagate genuinely useful innovations.
The second stream is people with a clear purpose, deeply immersed in the context, now finding they have the powers only a full-stack software developer had a mere few years ago.
This is civic tech staff inside city governments, editors at community and non-profit newsrooms and programmatic staff inside philanthropies. Practitioners who know the context are now able to spin up hyper-specific and well-informed tools to do their jobs better.
This is not intended to discourage experimentation. But while the cost of creating things might appear to be near zero now (assuming you have, or someone is providing, open civic data), rebuilding the same tools again and again without variation has other costs.
For starters, it might be hard to find a purpose for another “legislation explainer” unless there’s something notably innovative about it. So your own time, while ostensibly saved in development, might be better spent elsewhere.
But further still, cloud-based AI coding tools are, in fact, resource-intensive. So, we should endeavor to build tech that actually serves a purpose and isn’t the software equivalent of a pet rock.
Critiques aside, there are a bunch of neat (and genuinely useful) things coming through. But finding the right user and audience for the things we're building is the new choke point.
So, true to our ongoing mission, and in an effort to facilitate discovery and collaboration, we’re experimenting with an old favorite format: the show & tell.
On July 10th, we’re hosting our first “Vibecode Show & Tell” session to share an example of someone building great things with AI tools.
We'll kick off the series with Nathan Storey.
Nathan's built Civic AI Tools, which, among other things, has connected an entire pantheon of open government and open civic data to the AI ecosystem through bridge tech called a Model Context Protocol (MCP). Nathan has continued to expand and deepen this project in all kinds of interesting ways, so we’re eager to hear the latest from him.
We’ll start things off by asking what he’s made and why, before exploring his coding set-up and any tools or tips he wants to share with other civic hackers.
Finally, we’ll have a bit of Q&A / open discussion time.
Nathan might be the first, but he won’t be the last. So if you’d like to show off your work in a future show & tell edition, let us know.