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

Welcome 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. Marco, we may, we may not be able to do our podcast today. We are haunted by expired, 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 release the article?

I do. And maybe I'll kind of do it live on the fly here. And so why don't we— 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 4. 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. 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. And 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, 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. 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 a kind of kid-friendly fortunes. Now this year, uh, I was thinking about doing this, and since we're talking, I'm gonna do this live now. I'm gonna actually do this live. I'm gonna, let me give you a moment.

You're gonna, are you gonna read my fortune?

We're gonna, we're gonna make a fortune for you.

Yeah.

So I think that for this, now there's lots of tools that I can use to do this. I could use Lovable, I could use Bolt, I can use v0. I'm gonna 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 gonna 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. My daughter, uh, is in honors chemistry and she was at the time studying polyatomic ions, uh, chlorate, perchlorate, you know, sulfate, stuff like that. And, uh, she needed to memorize the name to the, 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, uh, is because I know that kind of worked for me before. And in a way you could look at this as kind of being a flashcard app too. It's gonna kind of make these flashcards of fortunes, I guess.

Uh, oh my gosh. Well, I, I have a block party tomorrow, so I might steal your idea.

You could do this.

I'm excited about it.

You could definitely pass for a fortune teller as well. You know?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, so this is gonna, oh, it made a PRD. That's, you know, I love this.

It made a PRD. 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 gonna write this in HTML and you know, this is, this is common and now it's got some CSS, so it's gonna style, uh, the page. But I mean, this is, this is vibe coding, or anyway, frontend 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. Now, if I'm doing a real project, like a serious project, it's not just a little fortune teller app. Nowadays, I will 100% use SpecKit. I absolutely do use Spec Kit. 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 Spec Kit. So here, like, this is a full feature specification that I'm working on. I have this whole agent thing that I'm, I'm working on. And I am adding this ability to give user feedback. So this agent will like fill out a questionnaire for me and that's cool, but I wanna be able to pick a, 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 Spec Kit. And so like, this is the proper way to write a spec. When you use Spec Kit, it does this stuff over here. So you see what it's gonna 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 like a ton of feedback? Then what do I do? And it, it'll, it'll lob all of these questions at me while it does this. So Spec Kit is cool. It's totally free. It works with like, I'm, in this case I'm using it with GitHub Copilot, but it works with Font Code and it works with Cursor and all these other things. So that is super cool. Uh, I love it. It helps you write a better spec. Uh, but anyway.

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

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 gonna kind of prompt my way towards doing something and it's starting to generate again. So, I mean, I mean, you gotta admit though, I mean, it's pretty freaking good on the first try.

It is really good. You know what? I haven't seen, um, this GitHub Spark, uh, done live, but the design is actually really Cute. So, so often in these vibe coding tools, you get these incredibly boring designs, but that is actually quite, quite lovely. Okay.

All right.

Let's see. Did we get it?

It's done. It says it's done. 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's— it is. That is lovely and kid-friendly.

Still maybe a little bit on the big words there. I mean, I could—

And on the abstract side.

Yeah, on the abstract side. I mean, uh, let's see, make the fortunes a little more concrete.

And, 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, 2 or 3 years old, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And for them, sometimes I'll like not even use my little app thing and I'll be like, you're gonna try a new food today and it's gonna be yummy. And their parents will be like, thank you.

Like, your candy in your Halloween bag will multiply.

But I mean, you know, Piedmont is a small town and I actually know a lot of these parents and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And sometimes 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 teller 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. Are 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 do like that.

That would entertain my six-year-old.

I mean, that is very concrete for sure. And now you know your six-year-old. Yeah, would totally be looking for. Oh, where's that rock that looks like the slice of pizza? I'm gonna find it.

That's exactly right. Okay, I one more. Let's see.

One more. This week we okay again with the rock. Maybe it's going a little over much on the rocks here. You'll recover a rock that looks like a cup. Okay. Sprinkles of happiness. I mean, this is why you never, you gotta like 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, that maybe, I mean, got it.

Okay. I, um, you know, it's, it's Halloween. It's, Almost 11:00 AM. I've got, I, 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 all 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 off.

We'll have this every year. We'll have like different elements to Halloween every year.

Perfect. Well, we'll get you back on, on the pod soon, and I think I'm gonna just, I'm gonna go cut this and, 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.