Rene Turcios, 29, from San Francisco, has won 200 IT hackathons in two years, an ambitious achievement for someone with no programming skills.
René is a professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player, cannabis enthusiast, and reseller of Labubu toys, but he devotes most of his time to participating in IT hackathons. Since 2023, he has attended more than 200 events and won cash prizes and software credits.
The craziest thing about all this is that Tursios has no programming skills and is a representative of a new generation of programmers — the so-called web coders, i.e. people who write code with the help of AI chatbots.
«Rene is a true cybercoder», says R.J. Moscardon, a friend and fellow hacker who watched Tursios take second place at his first hackathon at the AGI House mansion in Hillsborough. «At first, all the engineers with prestigious degrees made fun of him. But now they’re all doing the same thing».
Coined in February by OpenAI co-founder Andriy Karpaty, the term «wibecoding» describes an easy and relaxed way of coding with AI — when a person doesn’t just write lines of code, but describes what they would like to create to a chatbot, while the chatbot generates the finished result. However, Tursios was engaged in webcoding long before this technique gained its name and popularity.
«I didn’t write a single line of code», — Tursios recalls his first hackathon, where he used plain English to encourage ChatGPT to create a program that could convert any song into a Lo-fi version.
When the organizers announced that the man had won second place, he screamed with joy.
«Not a single person knew who the hell I was, but that was my turning point. I realized that I could compete with people who had diplomas and prestigious jobs».
Born in Missouri, Turcios grew up in a family of lion and bear trainers in a circus. He didn’t go to college but decided to become a professional player of the Japanese collectible card game Yu-Gi-Oh. Eventually, he got tired of the nomadic life in tournaments and moved with his girlfriend to San Francisco, where he eventually founded a metaverse infrastructure company in 2022 — at the same time as ChatGPT has been released to the public.
René realized that AI was the future, but his team refused to accept the technology:
«My chief engineer said: “If you ask me to use artificial intelligence one more time, I’ll quit,”», recalls Tursios, who eventually closed the company and started attending hackathons to figure out how to use artificial intelligence on his own. «I knew that the more you win, the more likely you are to become the best player».
Tursios attended each of the hackathons held in San Francisco, and now he has gained popularity among IT companies as a person who can create a project using AI in a matter of hours — while experienced developers usually spend weeks on it.
Currently, Vibercoder conducts his own workshops to teach beginners and experienced IT professionals how to use artificial intelligence for coding as efficiently as possible.
Today, not only newcomers but also tech giants such as Amazon and Google are actively using web coding: the former, for example, uses the technique to increase employee productivity and is currently planning to implement official use of the Cursor toolwhile Google boss Sundar Pichai boasted that about 30% of the company’s code is already written by AI.
The aforementioned Cursor was developed by a startup with 60 employees, reached $100 million in recurring revenue in January 2025in less than two years since its launch. Another company, Windsurf, which launched its own code generation tool in November 2024, already has $50 million in annual revenue.
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