Jack Dorsey: Twitter cofounder, Block CEO … vibe coder.
If you missed it, the tech founder recently announced a new encrypted messaging app, Bitchat. The app works by connecting to other devices to communicate using something called a Bluetooth mesh network.
Dorsey called it “my weekend project,” a turnaround time that naturally begged the question — did he use AI to help code it?
It turns out he did.
Dorsey has since confirmed he used Goose, Block’s AI coding assistant, to develop the project.
“This was one part of a series of challenges I’ve given myself: To build something every day that I didn’t think I was capable of, and that I didn’t think the current set of AI tools were capable of, namely Block’s tool Goose,” Dorsey wrote on GitHub. “I’m always surprised at how much…just works.”
Goose is Block’s open-source vibe coding tool. The AI agent autonomously writes code and debugs errors.
Dorsey’s original goal was to create a messaging app that would allow people to communicate without needing a phone number, email, or handle. He compared the app to FireChat, the Bluetooth mesh messaging platform that was popular during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in the early 2010s. FireChat was last updated in 2018, and access has since been shut down.
“It worked within a day,” Dorsey wrote about Bitchat. “So I added private messages, channels and private channels the next day.”
Bitchat is currently available via beta testing platform TestFlight, Apple’s beta testing platform on iOS, as well as Android devices. As for the App Store, Dorsey wrote that BitChat remains “blocked” for three reasons: More robust network optimization, noise protocol implementation, and the need for Apple approval.
This isn’t Dorsey’s first foray into vibe coding. In June, the Twitter co-founder attended the Oslo Freedom Forum, where he attended a workshop with Justin Moon, AI technical advisor for the Human Rights Foundation. Dorsey and Moon vibe-coded a new website for a partner organization in eight minutes, using only voice commands.
In his GitHub announcement, Dorsey wrote that there’s a “new way of programming now,” one with a new language and compiler: “English and intelligence models.”
Read the full article here
