Vibe Coders Tokyo
A year ago, Xinni and I started a meetup called Vibe Coders Tokyo after being curious to find people in Tokyo prototyping using vibe coding techniques, and wanting to share and learn from others.
We didn't want to be a huge meetup and make it a commercial thing, just something for fun we could do and hope to learn from. To our surprise, our first one had a decent turn out! More people showed up in the second one, and it just continued on from there.
The meetup attendees were pretty diverse. 50% of the attendees I talked to were not software engineers, but some tech adjacent people like program managers, UX designers, data scientists, and even non-tech people like artists and lawyers. It was by-far the most diverse meetup I had been to, let alone organized.
Thanks to Xinni's insistence, we curated the people who came. We gave priority to diverse representation, so our meetups didn't feel overly male dominated like the other tech-related meetups.
Many of the people who came had not vibe coded before. I recall several times people telling me that they had heard of the term, but wanted to know more so they signed up to come. Also on the other spectrum many people came with oodles of knowledge and were generous to share what they found out.
Organizing the meetup took a chunk of brainpower though. Our target was arranging the meetup monthly, but it required finding venue and preparing the agenda. The meetup was rarely the same format from month to month. First month there were speakers, the second was a workshop style, the third were discussions. We tried hard to keep the variety. Even our event thumbnails kept on changing.
Xinni flexed her design and artistic taste, made it always interesting, surprising even myself when stickers or t-shirts would show up. We even bought food in once or twice but gave up when people would actually complain about getting free food not being good enough!
To this day, the format is still in flux and that is by design.
Honestly, organizing it is not as fun as attending it.
There are a lot of logistics to worry about leading up to the event: do we have enough sign ups? where will the next event be? will the speakers show up?
Then during the event, we have organize entrance to the venue, signing people in, MC the meetup, organize the agenda, keep time, react to issues, moderate speakers/demos, take photos, monitor the live stream (oh we made it hard by offering a live stream!), debug AV issues and tidy up and close out the venue.
Post meetup, we write up some notes on the event, work out where the next event is going to be held, work out timing, decide on the format, participate in the socials.
And did we mention we don't get anything out of this, we haven't been paid any money to do this. Neither have our generous venue sponsors.
Vibe Coders Tokyo is about good vibes and not taking ourselves super seriously. Our focus has been stickers and swag. If we ever get any sponsorship money, we use it 100% on making something for the attendees.
Some people consider this an AI meetup, but having attended other AI meetups, Vibe Coders Tokyo is like the kids version of AI meetups. We don't take ourselves super seriously but we do try our best to make the evening fun and interesting, and not procedural and commercial.
To keep a record of all the meetups we've done. a few months ago we registered a domain name and in the name of the meetup, I vibe coded the website for our meetup : vibecoders.fyi
The design is not spectacular, but hey, it captures the vibes. It is surprisingly easy to update it, just a Claude Code skill and our Luma URL, and it will update the site for me.
Honestly, my passion for vibe-coding has dampened recently. Not because I don't vibe code, but because it feels so normal to me. That early allure of magic and mystery has evaporated. I'm not wondering how to wield this clunky LLM any more, vibe coding is now a predictably and smooth operation. I am still delighted at what it can do, but not knocked over like I was a year ago. Vibe coding has gone from being a funny name to being serious business. People around me have gone from being skeptical to true believers.
To that end, I am taking some time off organizing Vibe Coders Tokyo. It's time to take a break, re-think what format or events around VCT in the future. If you're interested to help organize the meetup, please get in touch with us on the discord, instagram or email.