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He didn’t want to move away from his friends, so he built them an apartment building. Now, they all own it.

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Nearly a decade ago, real estate developer Chad Dale made a purchase that changed the way he thought about how people live together.

Dale and a small group of his friends had decided to pool their money to purchase a vacation home on Whidbey Island, about an hour from Seattle. With five families with young children cycling in and out of the four-bedroom, one-bath farmhouse sharing meals, splitting chores, and weathering the inevitable frictions of living in close quarters, Dale realized that sharing property was a great idea in theory, but not sustainable in practice.

“There were a lot of people sharing an intimate space — it was a little too intimate,” Dale told Business Insider. “There were lots [of things] about that place that were great, and lots that weren’t great.”

The vacation home experiment’s shortcomings sparked an idea for something bigger and more permanent.

For years, Dale turned over the same question: What would communal living look like if it were designed to last?

He found his answer in co-housing, an arrangement where people have private homes but share amenities and collectively manage common spaces. Not to be confused with co-living, which is when people have private rooms in shared homes, co-housing is unlike a typical rental setup in that residents also often have an ownership stake or governance role in the housing community. It’s a housing model that is gaining traction as people seek more sustainable, community-oriented housing.

An ‘adult version’ of a co-op community


A rooftop of a residential building with people sitting on furniture.

The rooftop of Shared Roof.

Andrew Storey



Dale is the developer behind Shared Roof, a 35-unit community that opened in 2023 in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood.

Dale financed the project with the help of 13 other friends and family members, each of whom invested in the building. Contributions ranged from $50,000 to $5 million, and ownership stakes in the building’s LLC are proportional to each person’s investment. At Shared Roof, there are no HOA fees; residents still pay monthly rent, but it goes directly to the LLC rather than a traditional landlord.

“It’s a business model that you see sometimes in office buildings, but I’d never seen one done in a mixed-use building,” said Ray Johnston, who helped lead the project as a founding partner of Johnston Architects. “The things that Chad and his friends came to the table with were exciting.”

Designing the building took careful planning


Side-by-side images of the interior of a residential building and inside its greenhouse.

The building was designed to promote community interaction.

Andrew Storey



Shared Roof is meant to feel more like a European block than a typical new build in Seattle. Dale points to places like Amsterdam, where design encourages neighborly interaction and sustainability, as sources of architectural inspiration.

The five-story building wraps around an interior courtyard, with underground parking below. No two units are alike; residences range from about 2,000 to 5,000 square feet.

“One of the more interesting challenges in the project came on the fourth and fifth floors, where many of the long-term investors live, and the units were highly customized to serve the needs of different families,” Johnston said. “It required thoughtful, more detailed spatial planning than in typical multifamily projects to make those individualized layouts fit together under one roof, but it also presented an opportunity to create spaces that reflected how the residents wanted to live.”

While residents have private homes, they share a suite of amenities, including a library, an art room, and a rooftop greenhouse. Street-level retail — such as a café, a brewery, and several restaurants — help keep the community connected to the surrounding neighborhood.


A top view of Shared Roof, featuring its solar panels and greenhouse.

The building has solar panels on the roof, electric heat pumps, and energy-recovery ventilators.

Andrew Storey



For Dale, co-housing was a way to get the community and amenities he and his friends craved without paying peak city prices or having to move away entirely.

Still, living at Shared Roof isn’t cheap. Some larger units in the building have a monthly rent of $8,000. To ensure affordability, Shared Roof participates in Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption program (MFTE) and has set aside about 20% of units for moderate-income renters.

“It was incredibly important for us to have as much diversity — including income diversity — in the building as we could,” Dale said. “We’re huge supporters of infill diversity, rather than separate diversity. In my opinion, that’s not the correct approach.”

It’s a multi-generational building


A man and a woman smile on a balcony.

Chad Dale and his wife.

Courtesy of Chad Dale



Nine of Shared Roof’s investors live in the building, including Dale, who lives with his wife and their three kids in a 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom unit.

Dale views being surrounded by a mix of younger couples and older residents as a unique plus to their living arrangement.

“There are groups of people that benefit from being together, and our model was really about a generational, family-oriented approach,” he said.

“My folks and my wife’s folks are all in Michigan, so my kids didn’t get a lot of interaction with older people. To see my neighbor with Parkinson’s interacting with my 7-year-old — they’re both winning.”


Side-by-side images of a gym and a library room with people in both spaces.

The building’s gym and library room.

Andrew Storey



The kids also have plenty of other children their age in the building, and with so much to do there, from hanging out on the rooftop trampoline to playing on the 5,000-square-foot turf soccer field, hangouts are often — sometimes more than parents would prefer.

“They come home, crack the door, toss their school bag inside, and then leave because all their friends are around,” Dale said. He added that “while that’s really cool, and exactly what I was hoping for, it’s an unintended consequence.”

‘I love our life here’


A couple smiles in a selfie.

John Ware and his partner, Liesl Langley.

Courtesy of John Ware



John Ware, a technical program manager, and his partner, Liesl Langley, had been living in a large home in Phinney Ridge, but were looking to downsize as they entered the empty-nest years. After hearing about Shared Roof through word of mouth and touring the building, they were sold.

Ware and Langley are investors in the building and were among the first couples to move in. They’re in a 2,000-square-foot apartment with three bedrooms and 2.5 baths. Inside, it’s finished with hardwood floors, walnut custom cabinetry, and high-end appliances, including a Liebherr refrigerator.


A living room in an apartment, with a massive record collection and art on the walls.

Ware’s apartment.

Courtesy of John Ware



Fancy finishes aside, Ware said one of the biggest draws to living at Shared Roof is the community he and Langley have become a part of.

“I used to live in a building that had about 90 units, and I probably knew a third of folks, but we know every single person who lives in this building. We have a group chat on WhatsApp, so that folks can stay in touch with what’s happening,” Ware, 54, told Business Insider.

He and his partner have become the building’s unofficial — and, in practice, official — social directors. Every year, they host an Oscars party, and in the weeks leading up to it this month, they’ve been holding a movie night every week.

Ware said it’s little things like this that make co-housing worthwhile.

“We travel here and there, but after we’ve traveled for a while, I just want to be home, because of where we live — not just Seattle, but our neighborhood and community,” he added. “I love our life here and love this place.”

For some residents, co-housing is a lifeline in a pricey city


A woman poses next to her son, they smile in front of a greenhouse.

Mary Jo Wagner and her son.

Courtesy of Mary Jo Wagner



Mary Jo Wagner, a spa owner, fell in love with Shared Roof after visiting a client who lived there.

“I had just come to visit her one day for dinner, downstairs at one of the restaurants, and I was just thinking to myself how amazing it would be to live in a community like this,” Wagner, 53, told Business Insider.

Wagner moved in with her adult son in 2024, but he has since moved out. Over the past year, she downsized from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom unit with her dog. Her apartment is among the roughly 20% of units set aside in the building for moderate-income earners.

“The median income in the city is so incredibly high, so it drives up all the prices of the regular rental units that are available,” Wagner said. “The fact that Shared Roof participates in this MFTE program is absolutely amazing because it is more affordable.”


A woman walks a dog, and a man and a woman sit down at a table.

People sitting outside the wine bar.

Andrew Storey



Wagner said the building’s amenities, along with its retail stores, including a wine shop and a bakery, also helped seal the deal. She especially loves the building’s library and the rooftop garden.

“I live in a small one-bedroom unit, but if I want to have my friends or family over for a larger gathering, there are spaces in the building to do that, which is just amazing.”

For Wagner, Shared Roof doesn’t feel like a typical apartment complex. Beyond the extra amenities, the connections she’s made there feel genuine.

“Everybody kind of looks out for one another,” she said. “It feels a little bit like being a part of a large family.”




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I spent $61,000 building a personal pub in my backyard. There are 3 mistakes I wish I hadn’t made.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Stephen Hutyra, a 42-year-old program analyst living in the small town of West, Texas. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

In November 2020, I was inspired to build a pub in my backyard after seeing a Facebook post.

We have a saying that everything is bigger and better in Texas, so I wanted our pub to be bigger and better than the one I saw in the pictures online.

I spent three years and $61,000 building the space we call The Thirsty Goat on half an acre of land. A construction team built the structure, and I finished the work with my family’s help.

My family, friends, and I find ourselves sitting out here in the middle of the week until midnight, or until 2 or 3 a.m. on the weekends. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed it since finishing back in August, but we’re only just starting to see how much we’ll use it.

Still, there are a few things I wish I’d done differently.


Inside the pub Stephen Hutyra built in his backyard.

Inside The Thirsty Goat pub.

Stephen Hutyra



I should’ve connected a hot-water heater

The main mistake I made is something that my wife reminds me of all the time: I didn’t hook up hot water to the bathroom or the bar.

There’s only cold water coming out of both sinks.

I didn’t think I’d have the space for a hot-water heater, but I probably could have gotten one of those little tankless ones and put it on the outside.

It wouldn’t have taken much to add that on, and it’s been very cold washing hands and dishes in the winter, so I regret not doing that.


The bathroom inside Stephen Hutyra's backyard pub.

The bathroom inside The Thirsty Goat.

Stephen Hutyra



Unfortunately, I didn’t install a dishwasher either

It’s another thing my wife reminds me of all the time. I should have planned to install a small dishwasher below the cabinet that sits behind the bar.

I either have to wash dishes with cold water in the bar sink or load dirty glassware into a tub I haul into the house to wash in the dishwasher.

Having a dishwasher would really come in handy to load dirty dishes and cutlery throughout the day and night. But with the compact floor plan I mapped out, I just didn’t have the room.


The cabinets and sink in Stephen Hutyra's backyard pub.

The countertop area of the pub.

Stephen Hutyra



A little extra space behind the bar would have been nice

Initially, I only planned to put one mini fridge behind the bar. After I installed it, though, I measured the space left and realized I had enough room for a second fridge.

Having two has really made a big impact. I frequently use the second to store juices, lemons, limes, and other items for mixed drinks.

If I didn’t have the fridge, I’d probably have to use a small cooler with ice packs.

What I didn’t realize, though, is that because the countertop edge extends into that corner, the door to the second mini fridge can only open about halfway.

If I had installed shelves there as I initially planned, there wouldn’t be an issue.


The two mini fridges inside Stephen Hutyra's backyard pub.

The second fridge behind the bar can’t fully open.

Stephen Hutyra



Thankfully, there’s room for other appliances on top.

A microwave, coffee maker, and ice maker have taken about 40% of the empty counter space I had built behind the bar. The ice machine saves space, the microwave is good for guests to quickly reheat items, and adding Keurig single-serve coffee has been nice as well.

We no longer have to walk back into the house to make a cup of coffee in the mornings when we’re enjoying the pub.

I’ve had to adjust to a smaller workspace, but it’s worked out.




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I’m an Amazon tech lead who got promoted by building AI products. Here are my top vibe coding tips.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anni Chen, who has worked in Amazon software engineering for about three-and-a-half years. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her employment history.

AI helped me code, but more importantly, it helped with turning it into products. It’s the combination of grasping AI and translating it into scalable products that helped me get promoted faster.

I started off as a Software Engineer I, an entry-level role, in 2022. I was in the recommendations team working on serving recommendation widgets.

About two years ago, I started working on AI products on the side. That became huge and eventually spun off into its own team, which I’m a founding engineer of.

I was promoted in the recommendations team to Software Engineer II, and then I got promoted in the current team to senior engineer.

I focus on what we call memory, which powers personalization in generative AI experiences across Amazon.

AI writes 95% of my code

I started using AI as a side project to generate engaging titles for recommendation widgets when ChatGPT and Claude emerged. I saw how powerful it is in generating something really creative.

I started thinking: whenever I have a question or I want to code something up, I’ll just ask AI for help first before I attempt it.

I saw that the solution it came up with was leveling up my own code, and it helped me code more, too. Now I would say almost 95% of the code authored by me is written by AI.

I’m not just using AI to code; I also integrate AI’s output into products. I need to have a deep understanding of how AI works, what works well, and what doesn’t.

I have to be open and receptive to new models and tools coming out that can help with product iterations and make products better.

I work as a tech lead on large-scale LLM-driven systems in production environments, so I have a front-row seat to how AI-assisted workflows behave, not just in prototypes but under real-world scale and cross-team collaboration.

Top tips for vibe coding

The first tip is understanding the inner workings of LLMs and where they might fail.

LLMs are pre-trained — they’re trained on a large corpus, and it’s a probabilistic game. It’s followed by supervised fine-tuning, so the model will answer based on the structuring of a question and the answering format. Lastly, it’s followed by RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback.

By understanding these three steps, you can know, for example, when the LLM will not understand what you’re talking about, and when it needs domain knowledge from you. You will know when to use a new window or why hallucinations happen.

By understanding the limitations of the context window, you know when to break problems down. You will learn how to follow the structure to break things down into lower levels, and then you slowly focus on each component and generate.

By understanding the inner workings, you also know that you have to explain things to a peer. If you don’t explain in detail, it will default all those assumptions to the most common pattern, but that might not fit your use case.

My second tip: Think before vibe coding.

If you check the answer first, then your thoughts will be swayed by the answers. Compare your thoughts versus the LLM’s and see what the gaps are — what you didn’t know, and why the answer differs. From there, you know what implicit assumptions you haven’t told the LLM.

Thirdly, prompt for hard questions. Ask questions like what is the fallback when there is an error, or how this is going to scale? This is like a teacher asking a student, or a senior engineer asking a junior engineer to make sure the hard cases are covered. If you want the product to scale, think about it from day one and be conscious about asking those scaling questions.

Lastly, review and understand. Always review at each step, not just review after the whole code is generated. This ensures errors stop early rather than cascading all the way to the end, where you need to redo everything.

Creating wrong code is very dangerous. The presence of code makes people think, “Okay, this is good, it’s working.” But wrong code that enters production can cause more damage than the absence of functionality.

Understanding code is still important

You have to understand your own code. AI lowers the barrier to writing code, but not the responsibility for understanding it.

If something goes wrong and the code was committed by you, you’re the one responsible.

Imagine your code breaks in production, and you need to fix it, and you say, “I also don’t know, AI told me.” That’s not the correct way.

I don’t think we can entrust AI with such high-stakes tasks yet.

Understanding becomes easier with AI because it’s also a perfect learning opportunity. You can simply open another window and ask it to explain the concept.

If you ask in the same window about what it produced, it will explain only in that context. But you want to understand the concept more generally and see whether it makes sense to apply in this case.

Do you have a story to share about coding with AI? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.




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We’re a couple in our 30s who dreamed of building a tiny home. My parents had concerns, so we made a pitch deck to convince them.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anne Leijdekkers, 32, a Dutch arts entrepreneur, and Simone Solazzo, 31, an Italian who used to work in tech. Last year, the couple moved into the house they built in the tiny-home village of Minitopia in Valkenswaard, the Netherlands. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Anne: At first, my parents were sceptical about our plan to build our own tiny home.

Friends will always stand behind you, but family members can be more critical. It was important for us to have them on board.

Simone used to work in the corporate world and loves PowerPoint presentations, so on Christmas Day in 2024, we used one to pitch our dream to my family.

We wanted to be financially autonomous

Simone: I liked the idea of being able to explain to them why we wanted to do this and what we were planning. The first slide said, in Dutch, “We are building our home. We’d like your support.”

In the presentation, we told them about the plan, the timeline, and where we would be living. We included our budget, which ranged from 40,000 to 80,000 euros ($47,000 to $94,000).

Mostly, the slides outlined our motivations. The first reason was to be financially autonomous.

If we were to buy a big house, we’d be committing to a big mortgage. Instead, we used our savings to pay for the construction of the tiny home, and its transportation to the Minitopia site in Valkenswaard. In total, the project cost us 75,000 euros.

We don’t have a mortgage, and our monthly costs are relatively low. We spend about 500 euros a month on ground rent, utilities, and insurance. I imagine the monthly costs of running a larger property would be considerably higher.

Living in a tiny house is like being a snail

Simone: When you have a smaller space, you have to limit your possessions to what you actually need.

Anne: It was important for us to find out whether we were capable of doing that. We wanted to show that there’s a different way to live. You don’t need an attic at the end of your life filled with so many things.

It wasn’t about being minimalist as much as decluttering. It’s almost like being a snail. We keep things compact and can move our home whenever we want.

That’s how we arrived here: putting our tiny house on a truck and moving it.

Simone: We also like that the house can evolve with us. This means it can be our forever home. For example, if we decide one day to have kids, we could easily build a second module on top.


Simone Solazzo shows photos of construction and presentation

In the presentation, the couple shared their motivations for building a tiny home, which included financial autonomy.

Joshua Nelken-Zitser



Living in a tiny home encourages you to spend time outdoors

Simone: We both felt that knowing how to build and dismantle things was an important skill to learn. We like to challenge ourselves, and building our own home felt like the ultimate challenge. It turned out to be a real learning experience.

We’ve become handier. Sometimes, when it’s raining heavily, I wake up in the middle of the night worried about a leak. But now, if something goes wrong, I know how to deal with it.

Another bonus of living in a tiny house is that it encourages you to spend more time outdoors. When you have a big house, you can do most things inside. When your home is tiny, you need to get outside and move around in nature. We haven’t lived here in the spring or summer yet, so we’re looking forward to seeing what that is like.

My parents had concerns, but they stood behind us

Anne: The final slide said, “Let’s think about it and make it together — as a family.”

Before the presentation, my parents had concerns: was it a sensible investment? What if we wanted to have children? Were we actually capable of building it ourselves? My brother even suggested we buy a pre-made tiny house on Amazon.

After the presentation, they still had concerns about the financial rationale, but they understood our dream and 100% stood behind us. That was an amazing feeling.

We spent two months planning, budgeting, and designing, and then we started building. We began the process exactly a year ago, and it took about five months. Now that it’s finished, they’re very proud of us.

Simone: Anne’s father, who is in his 70s, even helped us build it. It gave her a beautiful opportunity to spend time with him and to build new memories.

Anne: It turned out to be a really warm period in our lives.




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Elon Musk said we’d reach Mars in 2026. Now, he says SpaceX is building a city on the moon.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX just overhauled its to-do list.

In an X post on Sunday, the CEO said that the company is shifting its focus from Mars to creating a “self-growing city” on the moon.

“It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time),” Musk wrote. “This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.”

The announcement is a big departure from Musk’s previous comments about reaching the red planet this year.

In 2020, the SpaceX CEO said he was confident that the company would land humans on Mars by 2026.

“If we get lucky, maybe four years,” Musk said at an awards show in 2020. “We want to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years.”

The space company has historically delayed ambitious projects because of their complexity and regulatory challenges. Last week, the company delayed the Artemis 2 moon mission, the first human moon mission in more than 50 years.

Mars is still part of the plan

In Sunday’s post, Musk added that SpaceX would continue building a Mars city, starting in five to seven years.

“But the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” he wrote.

Last week, Musk announced that SpaceX would acquire xAI, his AI company behind the chatbot Grok. XAI purchased the social media platform X in March 2025.

The CEO wrote that SpaceX’s xAI acquisition would create “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”

In the memo, Musk shared plans to have “self-growing bases” and factories on the moon. He also mentioned having “an entire civilization on Mars.”




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I embedded myself in a vibe coding team at Gemini’s AI hackathon in Singapore. Building an app in 7 hours takes real work.

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  • I spent seven hours with a vibe coding team at Google’s Gemini 3 hackathon in Singapore.
  • Watching from the sidelines was intense.
  • From prompting and debugging to filming the demo — here’s how it all unfolded.

Just after sunrise, four vibe coding enthusiasts from Malaysia crossed into Singapore with a loose idea — and a bet that AI could build most of their app.

Hours later, they were racing to prototype it at Google’s Gemini 3 Hackathon in Singapore.

The four friends, all in their late 30s to 40s, came from different professional backgrounds. Chan Wei Khjan is an accountant. Chan Ler-Kuan lectures on AI at a private university. Loh Wah Kiang works in IT. Lee How Siem, who goes by Benny, is the chief technology officer of a Malaysian startup.

Their initial idea was a “feng shui” app to analyze properties in Singapore — a potentially lucrative use case in a market obsessed with housing and wealth accumulation. Feng shui is a traditional Chinese practice that evaluates how a person’s surroundings, along with birth factors, influence luck and well-being.

I embedded with the team at Google’s developer space in Singapore in January to observe how a vibe-coding project comes together — or nearly falls apart — in seven hours.

9:30 a.m.: The brief

Thorsten Schaeff from Google DeepMind welcomed the participants.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

The assignment: Teams of up to four people had to build a working demo, publish a public repository with code, and submit a short video explaining their project by 5:30 p.m.

Each project had to fit into one of six tracks, including generative media, deep research, and enterprise orchestration.

Organized by Google DeepMind and 65labs, Singapore’s AI builder collective, the hackathon featured a 100,000-credit Gemini API prize pool, with first place getting 30,000 credits.

By the end of the day, 189 participants had built 76 projects.

10:30 a.m.: Getting started


Hackathon team getting started

The team discusses how to prototype their idea.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

The team had pivoted to a new idea due to time constraints: a feng shui app that could analyse a user’s outfit and workspace through the phone camera in real time and assess how “lucky” they were.

Wei Khjan took the lead on prompting. He typed the first instructions into Claude, asking it to generate the workflow and code. Ler-Kuan focused on whether the AI’s output aligned with feng shui concepts. Wah Kiang and Benny hovered over the codebase, refining ideas and flagging issues.

“For people who don’t know how to read code, it’s helpful to have people who do,” Wei Khjan said.

While waiting for the code to be generated, Ler-Kuan opened Google’s AI Studio to design the app’s logo. They called their app “Feng Shui Banana.”

11:40 a.m.: The bugs arrive


computer screen with code

The implementation plan was generated by AI.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

After about an hour, Claude generated the initial codebase for the app. It was designed to work with the Gemini Live API, enabling real-time image and text analysis. It ran but was riddled with bugs.

An error message flashed when they tested the camera feature, so Wei Khjan copied the error back into the AI and asked for it to be fixed. Minutes later, the feature worked.

It wasn’t right. The feng shui logic was off, especially where colour analysis intersected with the user’s birth timings. Ler-Kuan manually corrected the underlying dictionary and its mappings.

The team kept prompting to tighten the features: shorter explanations, clearer output, and more streamlined user interfaces.

By 12 p.m., the app was rough, but it existed.

12:20 p.m.: Lunch can wait


Testing the feng shui app

Ler-Kuan tests the camera feature on the app.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

Lunch arrived. The team stayed glued to their screens.

The app didn’t respond instantly when a user changed their outfit, nor did it update its feng shui analysis in real time.

Wei Khjan explained how one prompt matters. Instead of issuing commands, he asked the AI to “discuss it with me.” The shift changed how the model reasoned, and it worked more like a collaborator.

After some prompting, the app updated with a real-time camera analysis. It was striking to watch a feature emerging from a short back-and-forth with AI.

1 p.m.: Putting the app to the test


Screenshot of me testing the app

A screenshot of the feng shui app on my phone as I test its camera feature.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

I helped the team test the app.

The camera correctly identified what I was wearing: a dark green polo, a yellow participant tag, and a white name card hanging from my neck. According to the app, I was already wearing colours aligned with my luck for the day.

The app suggested small tweaks, such as additional accessories, that could enhance the feng shui of my outfit.

1:20 p.m.: Pizza break


Pizza break

The team munched down their pizzas in about 20 minutes.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

They finally had lunch and joked around to ease the tension. Four hours remained before they had to submit their project.

1:40 p.m.: Back to work


Feng shui banana landing page

The landing page for their app.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

Ler-Kuan shifted focus to workspace feng shui, feeding knowledge into the model and refining how the app would evaluate desks and work setups. Wah Kiang and Benny worked on the video demo.

By 2 p.m., they had a landing page that looked animated and 3D. When I asked Wei Khjan how he felt, he smiled.

The team also revisited the app’s tagline. After cycling through suggestions from multiple AI models, they settled on a line that didn’t come from an AI at all: “A wisdom, not a superstition.”

3 p.m.: Filming the demo


Filming the demo

Wah Kiang and Benny are filming Ler-Kuan as they reenact scenes for their demo video.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

By late afternoon, the restlessness was showing. The team snacked and paced, then decided to film the video explaining their project.

They used Gemini to generate a storyboard for the demo video. The model laid out several scenes and drafted the script. The team followed along, filming clips and stitching everything together as they went.

Their workspace feature was also up and running.

4 p.m.: Final touches


Hackathon team scrambling

The team is hard at work as the deadline approaches.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

The app had come together nicely. With some time to spare, they decided to add audio output for users who prefer listening to reading on a screen.

The first attempt to generate a voice using AI fell flat. It sounded robotic.

After debugging and several iterations, they landed on a voice they liked, similar to how a Chinese feng shui master might speak.

5:30 p.m.: Deadline


Finishing the hackathon

Taking a group photo as they submit the project.

Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider

As the deadline approached, the team was still stitching clips for their video and nitpicking the AI-generated presenter voice.

The organizers had urged teams to submit early. With about 15 minutes to spare, they made the call to lock the final cut and hit submit.

Then it was over. The hunger hit immediately, and everyone got in line for some well-deserved food.

Even as an observer, watching from the sidelines was tiring. Seven hours of vibe coding turned out to be anything but effortless.

The team didn’t win a prize, but agreed that the hackathon had been worth it.

“Sometimes, the best experiences come from saying ‘yes’ without overthinking,” said Ler Kuan. “Innovation starts with curiosity and a little bit of spontaneity.”

Do you have a story to share about vibe coding? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.




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This is the key breakthrough AI still requires to reach superintelligence, according to those building it

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In humans, working memory — our ability to hold and use information in everyday life — is closely linked to general intelligence.

That means the ability for AI to remember things could be the key to realizing a superintelligent AI, a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well or better than humans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks it’s hard to predict just how intelligent AI can really be because the possibilities of memory retention are limitless.

“Even if you have the world’s best personal assistant, they don’t, they can’t remember every word you’ve ever said in your life, they can’t have read every email, they can’t have read every document you’ve ever written, they can’t be looking at all your work every day and remembering every little detail, they can’t be a participant in your life to that degree. No human has like infinite, perfect memory,” Altman said recently on the “Big Technology” podcast.

AI, however, will definitely have the capacity for that, he said.

“Right now, memory is still very crude, very early,” he said. Once AI is able to remember every granular detail of a user’s life, including even the small preferences they didn’t explicitly indicate, it will be “super powerful,” he said.

Altman added that it’s one of the future features he’s most excited about — and he’s not the only one.

Andrew Pignanelli, the cofounder of The General Intelligence Company of New York, a company that builds AI agents for businesses, said that memory will become the biggest focus for AI companies in the coming year.

“It will become the most important topic discussed and recognized as the final step before AGI,” Pignanelli wrote in a blog post. “Every model provider will add and improve on memory for their apps after seeing OpenAI’s success with ChatGPT memory (like Claude just did).”

Pignanelli, however, said that the industry is still a long way from perfecting long-term memory.

“Larger context windows continue to improve things, as they allow more data to be passed into the context window, which allows the agent to better read parts of a large memory index,” he wrote, in reference to the amount of information a large language model can process in a single prompt. “Even then, though, the vast level of detail that we need to reach to consider something AGI requires memory architecture improvements.”

Even shorter-term episodic memory hasn’t been fully solved yet, he said.

Solving that memory problem is the ticket to turning AI from something that feels artificial to something that seems human, he said.

“Our systems today get the interaction part right. In terms of a Turing test for interaction, we’re basically all the way there. But that’s only half of what’s needed to make a digital self,” he wrote.

“The first AGI will be a very intelligent processor combined with a very good memory system,” he said.




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