You’ve created the cute artificial intelligence (AI) caricature that probably gave you three arms. You’ve utilized an AI tool to help you write your annual meeting remarks. Maybe you even used AI to score your members’ involvement and identify who is at risk of disengaging.
That was all helpful and fun, but it doesn’t seem revolutionary. Surely, there is more to AI.
There is.
Have you tried “vibe coding?”
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This article is brought to you by Institute for Organization Management, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s professional development program for nonprofit executives.
Vibe coding is the process of telling an AI what you want to accomplish and letting it build the application to do it.
For instance, your community has a dozen organizations that hold significant events, and you want a calendar of all of those events. Go to your AI large language model (LLM) of choice and say, “I want to give you a list of 12 websites that have event calendars. I want you to create a program that will look at their websites each month and produce a unified calendar showing all of their events.”
Notice what you didn’t do: you didn’t tell it how to build it. You told it what you wanted.
Think of how much time that saves compared to manually looking up those calendars each month.
Now, here’s the intimidating part: the LLM will probably say something like “I can write a Python script for that.” It will then spit out something that looks like English but feels like Greek. You will feel stuck.
Whenever you feel stuck, just ask for help.
“I don’t know what to do with that. Please give me step-by-step instructions on what to do next.”
The AI will guide you.
It will tell you what window to open, where to paste the code, and what command to type.
Then you’ll get an error message.
Let the AI fix the error. Copy and paste that error back into your LLM and the AI will troubleshoot its code and make corrections. Keep doing that until you have a working version. The first time may take as long as doing the task yourself, but the time savings in the future are worth the investment.
We’ve used this process to scrape chamber budget data from online 990s, grab logo files from every organization in a spreadsheet, create an interactive relationship manager for elected officials and mass produce customized videos.
If you’ve ever said, “I wish I had an app that could do…” now you can create it.
Still intimidated by the idea of cutting and pasting code? Instead of giving your summer intern time-consuming tasks that are done once, challenge them to create applications you can use long after they return to school.
Using your talent to build systems and leveraging AI to automate time-consuming tasks? That’s good AI vibes.
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About the author
Brian Francis
Brian Francis is founder of Lumin Strategies and a faculty member for the U.S. Chamber Institute for Organization Management (IOM).
