The work uses the code language Python, and while they had Python experts on the team, Reyna estimated that under normal circumstances, it would still take about five weeks to finish. Instead, it took them two days.
Reyna and his cohort were able to shrink the timeline, drastically, by using something called vibe coding, a relatively new AI-powered software development technique. It’s also something that some experts in public-sector technology say has the potential to help public servants more easily prototype ideas, which could in turn help working with vendors by ultimately expediting procurement processes, among other improvements.
“I felt a little bit like a door unlocked,” Reyna said. “I know a fair amount of coding languages but I don’t do a lot of Python … using it was empowering for sure.”
Vibe coding functions similarly to other generative AI technologies run by large language models. As with ChatGPT, users essentially operate through prompts, building software by describing the functionality they want with natural language. The platform then does the coding for them.
Reyna, as well as other public-sector technologists interviewed for this story, said that the tech is far from perfect. Users, they warned, should not just put anything into it and expect the result to be unimpeachable. As with any public-sector work, especially work that involves data, there are security concerns. So, the work that vibe coding returns needs to be double-checked and examined, but, they also noted, double checking still does not take nearly as long as doing it from scratch. Again, it’s that difference between five weeks and two days.
This is what makes it more useful for internal applications and proofs of concept, rather than for work that could be public-facing or otherwise outside of government firewalls. Reyna said that there are serious conversations being had in Austin about using vibe coding to create prototypes of work.
It should also be noted, of course, that the use of vibe coding in the public sector does not currently appear to be widespread, though the interest is there.
At last week’s Beyond the Beltway* conference outside of Washington, D.C., Utah CIO Alan Fuller spoke about the possibilities vibe coding holds for in-house development. “We can’t ignore the possibility that these AI tools are going to make it way cheaper and faster to develop,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a part of our strategy going forward.”
One interesting example comes from a tech lead in a small town in New England — Melanie McDonough, of Lebanon, N.H.
McDonough is the chief innovation and AI officer in the city of about 14,000 residents, located near the state’s border with Vermont, much closer to ski resorts than it is to any major metropolitan area. McDonough said she has used vibe coding in her work, mostly for internal projects like the ones Reyna described, but she has also used it to make the city’s strategic plan — a dense and thorough document — searchable online.
It was actually McDonough who turned Austin’s technologists onto the government uses of vibe coding, as she has with her counterparts in a few other cities, including Anchorage, Alaska — almost exclusively for prototyping.
“I think where a lot of us are is, ‘Hey, does this have merit and does it actually work?’” McDonough said.
And the benefits if it does work could be huge, especially for small jurisdictions like Lebanon.
McDonough pointed to work like making a zoning ordinance more accessible. Her example was a resident who comes to the city wanting to know if they can have chickens in their backyard. Zoning ordinances are covered there by a dense PDF that spans more than 200 pages, and they can also vary by zoning district. Most people, of course, do not know which zoning district their address falls under, and neither do the city staff.
But with vibe coding, she could potentially make a tool that answers all the relevant questions based on where a person lives, simplifying as well as speeding up the process of figuring out who is and who is not allowed to have chickens in their backyards.
“What this tends to do is give us an idea of what a solution could look like and does it have viability — then you’re still dealing with the issue of scale,” McDonough said.
That’s why vibe coding, for the moment, seems to be best used in government for prototyping and helping technologists interact with vendors. It can bring their rough ideas to life as more of an outline than a fully scaled platform, giving vendors a clearer picture of the exact product or work that a city would like done.
McDonough does have some words of caution around vibe coding, and chief among them is to only use data that is already public. To do otherwise would risk sharing sensitive data with the platform in a way that might expose it. One of the benefits of working with a vendor is that they must meet high security compliance requirements needed by the public sector.
For her vibe coding, McDonough has used a program called Replit, and one of its features is to do a security check before finalizing an application.
“It’s not to be taken lightly,” McDonough said, “but there are a lot of positive paths forward by having the right people trying this to see what problems they can solve.”
Conversely, McDonough said that vibe coding is also being used by tech vendors in the government space to speed up the rate at which they can show prototypes to their clients, making the fast prototyping it provides a sort of two-way street.
Nichole Sterling of the gov tech company, My Town AI, has an interesting perspective on that. Sterling is also the mayor pro tem of Nederland, Colo., so she has both the government and vendor perspective on vibe coding, even though it isn’t the focus of her company.
My Town AI, which went live with its first customers in May, primarily works with towns in Colorado, more than half a dozen of them, using AI to do things for government like writing grants and RFPs. While Sterling is not herself an engineer — her company has a team for that — she has at times used vibe coding to create initial user experiences to show her colleagues.
That’s perhaps a perfect example of what vibe coding can do for government, helping to bridge the gap between subject matter experts like Sterling and the solutions for the problems they seek to solve.
“For me vibe coding is about connecting dots in local government and the pain points we often have to endure,” Sterling said. “It’s bridging that with the technology that AI offers.”
*Note: Beyond the Beltway is hosted by e.Republic, Government Technology’s parent company.
