Send message to Author

Short abstract

This prototyping experiment asks what and how we can not-know by designing with (vibe coding with) genAI to create a useless ethnographic fieldnote generating chatbot, while arguing that vibe coding is an ethnographic practice in intervening with technicities materially as well as critically.

Long abstract

“Vibe Coding” emerged in early 2025, spawning not just reels, memes, and discussion, but its popularity has led to models being trained to do just that – generate code based on text prompts. Does this code actually compile? Sometimes, but often not (Danassis & Goel 2025; Fortes-Ferreira et al 2025). Taking cues from critical making (cf Bogers & Chiappini 2019), critically engaging materially for specific purposes, this experiment in prototyping an ethnographic chatbot asks how genAI can be appropriated otherwise – in the most absurd way possible.

My ongoing “StoryGen” project tinkers with genAI as a kind of “ethnographic projection” (Farias & Criado 2023), that, rather than looking at the collaborative epistemic environments (cf Felt 2022) to consider issues of expertise (cf Sarkar & Drosos 2025), this ethnographer uses “vibe coding” as ethnographic practice – not merely as a device to open up the ethnographic. Similarly, genAI is not imagined to be a collaborator, but as an absurd ensemble of digital, technological, and textual “things” that together move toward a kind of “gamification” of ethnographic practice, an exercise in “critical design” (Dunn 1997) that asks not what genAI can be useful for, but rather how tinkering with or designing with genAI can reframe our not-knowing (Wakkary et al 2015; Wakkary 2021). Ethnographic vibe coding is thus partly autoethnographic – and yet relies on text re-assembled through re-calculated weights in my fine-tuned model. The question shifts, then, from does it work (de Laet & Mol 2000) to what does it absorb?