Vibe-coding a kid-friendly AI fortune teller for your Halloween festivities | Marco Casalaina (Microsoft VP)

0:00Welcome to a spooky and unplanned Halloween edition of How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you use LLMs to do spooky stuff for your kids. Today, we had a haunted episode recording that we couldn't get to work. So instead of our regular scheduled programming, we did a quick Halloween vibe code that I think some of you parents out there will be inspired by. If you have other Halloween vibe codes, please share them with us in the comments and enjoy this very short episode of How I AI Halloween Edition.

0:39Marco, we may not be able to do our podcast today. We are haunted by expired corporate credit cards. but you have a Halloween-based AI use case we're going to talk about instead just for a few minutes before we reschedule.

0:57Marco Casalaina:I do. And maybe I'll kind of do it live on the fly here. And so why don't we not just talk about it? Why don't we actually do it? So I'm dressed as Captain Picard right now, as I do every year dressed as Captain Picard. I mean, it naturally fits with my, you know, brand and stuff like that. Of course, I am a huge Star Trek fan. I'm in the middle of Strange New Worlds right now, season four. but by night, at least for Halloween, I do something a little bit different. I am the block fortune teller. So this is the Halloween party block that I live on here in Piedmont, California. And so we will block off the street and all of our neighbors do crazy stuff.

1:37Marco Casalaina:And so, you know, my neighbor across the street is going to have all this projection stuff going on and they have like fire coming out of something. But what I do, well, I am a fortune teller. so traditionally uh what i have done for the past few years is that i have pre-created fortunes so i set up this table and on this table uh i have a crystal ball and the crystal ball glows and stuff like that it's not a high-tech crystal ball it has nothing but a couple of led lights in it but the kids come up and there's lots of kids in town you know hundreds of them really come up and they they will get their fortunes from this thing.

2:15Marco Casalaina:Now, in reality, what I did was I, in the past, have pre-created these fortunes. So I make a list of them with GPT-3 and then GPT-4, and I store them in a note on my phone, and I kind of keep it between my legs under the table, and I'll kind of pick one at random. So when a kid comes up, I'll pick this one, and I make kind of kid-friendly fortunes. Now, this year, I was thinking about doing this, and since we're talking, I'm going to do this live now. I'm going to actually do this live. Are you going to read my fortune? we're going to make a fortune for you, yeah? Yes. So I think that for this, now there's lots of tools that I can use to do this.

2:49Marco Casalaina:I can use Lovable, I can use Bolt, I can use V0. I'm going to use GitHub Spark for this one. Was not expecting a GitHub Spark today on Halloween, so this is exciting for me. How about that? Okay. So I'm going to say make a mobile app, which when I click a button, generates a new fortune. in the context of a fortune teller. Okay. I don't think I need to tell it much more than that. It's probably going to kind of work on the first try. Well, we'll see. Let's see what this does. Now, you know, in other circumstances, I have sometimes given it like a list of things to scroll between. You might have seen on the screen that earlier I had a chemistry ion flashcards app.

3:36Marco Casalaina:My daughter is in honors chemistry, And she was at the time studying polyatomic ions, chlorate, perchlorate, sulfate, stuff like that. And she needed to memorize the name to the formula of these polyatomic ions. And so I made a flashcards app with this thing, which actually worked really well. I mean, I just gave it basically the list of the polyatomic ions. And it totally freaking did it in this kind of flashcard interface that worked on the phone. And so that was pretty nice. That's kind of one of the reasons why I decided to go with GitHub Spark for this one is because I know that kind of worked for me before.

4:11Marco Casalaina:And in a way, you could look at this as kind of being a flashcard app, too. It's going to kind of make these flashcards of fortunes, I guess. Oh, my gosh. Well, I have a block party tomorrow, so I might steal your idea. You could do this. I'm excited about it. You could actually pass for a fortune teller as well. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So this is going to – oh, it made a PRD. that's you know i love to see it let's see can we see it let's see if we can see what it's doing while it's doing it oh it does okay so wow it's really it's going fast and furious over here so it's it's totally writing this prd over here and now it's it's made a page index so it's starting to make the actual html so it's it's going to write this in html and you know this is this is common and now it's got some css so it's going to style uh the page uh but i mean this is this is vibe coding or anyway front-end vibe coding as we do it today Now, in reality, though, I mean, when I'm doing real vibe coding projects, and while this thing is working, since I actually already have this on my screen, I'm going to bust this out over here.

5:15Marco Casalaina:Now, if I'm doing a real project, like a serious project, not just a little fortune teller app, nowadays, I will 100 % use SpecKit. I absolutely do use SpecKit. In fact, it so happens I was earlier today working on just such a project. So I am, by the way, I'm VP products of Core AI at Microsoft. However, I do come from an engineering background and I still code pretty much every day something. So I'm working on this project. And in this project where I did use SpecKit. So here, like this is a full feature specification that I'm working on. I have this whole agent thing that I'm working on. And I am adding this ability to give user feedback.

5:55Marco Casalaina:So this agent will like fill out a questionnaire for me. and that's cool, but I want to be able to pick a cell, a question and be like, no, no, you did that wrong, fix it. And then the agent should just wake up and do it. When you use SpecKit, and so this is the proper way to write a spec, when you use SpecKit, it does this stuff over here. So you see what it's going to do. It throws these questions at me. So it's like, wait a minute, how long should the feedback be? What if the user gives you a ton of feedback? Then what do I do? And it'll lob all of these questions at me while it does this. So SpecKit is cool.

6:27Marco Casalaina:It's totally free it works with like i'm in this case i'm using it with github copilot but it works with thought code and it works with cursor and all these other things so that is super cool i love it it helps you write a better spec uh look at this my app is here okay tap to reveal your fortune the cosmos okay i'm very excited about this wow okay that's a little bit too uh let me let me read this for people that are not on video. In the tapestry of the cosmos, the stars weave a path illuminated by your dreams. Trust in their guiding light. Now, what I like about this is it is completely ambiguous and means nothing.

7:07Excellent, excellent fortune. But I bet you want it to be a little more fun and kid-friendly for your use case.

7:14Marco Casalaina:And so over here on the left-hand side, you can see that I'm saying make each fortune only one sentence and make it kid-friendly. So now I'm going to kind of prompt my way towards doing something, and it's starting to generate again. So, I mean, you've got to admit, though, I mean, it's pretty freaking good on the first try. Really good. You know what? I haven't seen this GitHub Spark done live, but the design is actually really cute. So often in these vibe coding tools, you get these incredibly boring designs, but that is actually quite lovely. Okay. All right. Did we get it? It's done. It says it's done.

7:51Marco Casalaina:So here we go. Let's see what happens. Mystic Oracle, what is my fortune? When you sprinkle kindness like fairy dust, the whole world transforms into a playground of magical adventures and shimmering smiles. That is lovely and kid-friendly. Still, maybe a little bit on the big word there. And on the abstract side? Yeah, on the abstract side. I mean, let's see. Make the fortunes a little more concrete. And let's make them a little more fun. and maybe a little more humorous. Yeah. Try not to use such big words. I mean, a lot of times, like the kids that'll come up to my fortune telling booth, they'll be like, you know, two or three years old.

8:34Marco Casalaina:Yeah. And for them, sometimes I'll like, not even use my little app thing. And I'll be like, you're going to try a new food today. And it's going to be yummy. And their parents will be like, thank you. your candy and your halloween bag will multiply but i mean you know peabon is a small town and i actually know a lot of these parents and stuff like that they come back at me later and they're like you told my kid this fortune like i told one kid a fortune once and it was like you're gonna make a new friend today which actually did come from my my the previous version of this uh generation and uh she said he was talking about it for the whole next day she was like the fortune tell her said i'm gonna make a friend today like this is gonna be cool well your kid's 15 should i uh tell her she's gonna get a car in her future now okay now now we're going off the rails here okay here we go you ready here's your this is this one's for you claire okay ready this week you will find a shiny rock that looks like a slice of pizza and makes everyone giggle when you like that that would entertain my six-year-old i mean that is very concrete for sure and now you know Yeah, we'd totally be looking for, oh, where's that rock that looks like the slice of pizza?

9:45Marco Casalaina:I'm going to find it. That's exactly right. Okay. One more. One more. Let's see. One more. This week, okay, again with the rock. Maybe it's going a little over much on the rocks here. We'll discover a rock that looks like a cupcake. Sprinkles of that. I mean, this is why you have to integration test these things. Are these all rocks? Oh, no. Today, a fluffy squirrel will steal your snack, but then share a secret about the best hiding spots in the park. okay i'm surprised the squirrel is not sharing the secret about the best rocks in the park so i mean got it okay i um you know it's it's halloween it's almost 11 a.m i've got my block party's tomorrow so we're blocking off the street we're doing a post-halloween everybody bring your candy so you can give it a more away party and i'm gonna do this i'm gonna hook it up to voice sweet give it a like a spooky fortune teller voice and uh set it up out front oh well marco despite our haunted podcast episode we will get you back on to actually talk about spectrum and development but thank you for doing our first and maybe an annual tradition of our halloween ai how i ai episode thank you for showing this every year we'll have like different elements to Halloween.

11:10Marco Casalaina:Perfect. Well, we'll get you back on the pod soon. And I think I'm going to go cut this and share it. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.