Way back when, I was a member of a small Amiga Cracking/Demo group, that over time focused more and more on Demo and less and less on Cracking. Demo was, where it was at, we’d travel to Sweden and Italy and many other places, spending nights sleeping in train stations and city parks having spent all our money on the train ticket and McDonalds… it was a glorious time.
Then came the DCKs, the Demo Construction Kits. And the Amos Basic Compiler Templates. Both allowed everyone to build basic Demos. Scrollers, bouncers, music, even interactive elements. So we upped our game, added impossible sprite movements, kicked Copper and Blitter into places they weren’t supposed to go, tickled more music out of the system than it was meant to play.
DCK often caught up to us a few months later. My proudest moment, not going to lie, was when a German Amiga Magazine advertised a Disc containing a DCK to make “Demos just like Lowkey.” Another Demo Team, DOC (whom I hated with the passion of a thousand seething suns for having insanely racist “jokes” in their demos) even published their own DCK. I wonder what became of Michael H., and if he’s still a racist…
Long story short… that’s how Vibe Coders feel. It’s not that different from typing in five pages of hex numbers with control number/checksum every 16 numbers (anyone except me remembering those from C=64 and Amiga Magazines?) or running a DCK: the output might look like last year’s hype beast, but the creator doesn’t understand thing one about the code. And, frankly, understanding the machine, learning its nooks and crannies, that was what it was all about for me. Some Demos made it big, some fizzled, but very few of those moments stand out. What does stand out, are the nights, smoking rolled Gauloise Black in my room in the basement, hunched over an Amiga 500 connected to a shitty monitor, trying to edge out one more raster to close a loop or pouring over disassembler printouts to understand, how a game enforced its copy protection. And those Demos, the “Zero Day” ones, were the successful ones. If everyone can replicate last year’s peak code, those who create this year’s will be the winners.
I could have spent my youth making DCK demos and probably get laid more and earlier. I could have made money selling cracked games or creating demos for others. But that didn’t feel satisfying enough. I wanted to own what I did. And, sooner or later, when everyone vibe codes, that’ll be it again. In 5 years, all those slop apps with purple gradients and emojis, telltale signs of Claude or Codex, will be forgotten. Hand made code will survive. Because it will be at the apex of development, not two years behind. And, more importantly, it’ll fill its makers with pride.