teaching a whole company to build with AI in one day

Most people at SYPartners had incorporated AI into everyday workflows, but almost none had built anything with it. Leadership wanted the whole firm, from strategists to finance, to learn the basics of vibe coding in a single five-hour session. The participants would arrive with very different levels of experience and very different feelings about AI, and we needed to teach principles and concepts while making it hands-on and practical.

We landed on Replit as a universal tool for prototyping and learning vibe coding. We turned the day into a summer camp, with counselors, teams assigned to "cabins", and a camp challenge. Over the course of 3 weeks, I designed the day with two colleagues and built the app that ran it.

Campers checked in on their phones with four questions about their experience and feelings about AI, and how they work on a team. The answers appeared live on the wall, including a view that named the tension most of the room was holding. The same answers sorted everyone into balanced cabins by a simple ruleset: spread the most experienced people out, then mix disciplines and temperaments, and never use randomness. Each cabin was revealed on screen with an AI generated camp-themed group photo. The app also included a slide deck that ran the day, and a Slack bot in the voice of Smokey the Bear that answered questions and guided and corralled people throughout the breakout exercise.

To keep it meta, I built it in Replit, the tool we were about to teach, so the app running the room was also the proof that it could be done. Then everyone built a small app alone, and each cabin built a tool together.

Sixty-five people checked in, thirteen cabins published something by mid-afternoon, and the closing survey rated the day 4.4 out of 5 for value. Our CEO let us know that the praise coming in was as much about the sense of community the day created as the skills people left with.

The day was meant to start something, and it did. A new AI and creative technology discipline was announced at the close, weekly office hours began the following week, and the check-in survey became a standing way to track how the firm's relationship with AI is changing.