Rene Turcios, 29, from San Francisco, has attended more than 200 hackathons since 2023, earning money, software credits, and reputation. He doesn’t know how to code, but he wins prizes thanks to vibecoding.
Rene Turcios, 29, from San Francisco, has attended more than 200 hackathons since 2023, earning money, software credits, and reputation. He doesn’t know how to code, but he wins prizes thanks to vibecoding.
«Rene is a real vibe coder. At first, all the engineers with prestigious degrees made fun of him. But now they all do the same thing», — a friend and colleague of Tursios told The San Francisco Standard, adding that he saw him take second place in his first hackathon at AGI House in Hillsboro.
The programming method known as vibe coding, which involves engaging AI chatbots, was described in February 2025 by Andrey Karpaty, a former OpenAI researcher and now director of AI and computer vision for Autopilot at Tesla. However, Tursios was programming this way long before vibe coding got its name, and faced scorn for using AI.
«Nobody there knew who I was, but that was my turning point. I realized that I could compete with people who had degrees and prestigious jobs», — Turcios said of his first success.
He grew up in Missouri, where his parents worked for an international circus, taming bears and lions. Instead of going to college, Turcios returned to his family’s nomadic lifestyle and became a professional player of the Japanese trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh!.
«It was a very strange, strange lifestyle. I would go to special prestigious events to play against the best players,» said Rene Turcios, who traveled the country, sleeping on friends’ couches to play tournaments. He became so successful that other participants paid him hundreds of dollars to sign their cards.
But after two years, Tursios grew tired of the game and the nomadic lifestyle, so in 2019 he followed his girlfriend to San Francisco. He worked various jobs and eventually founded a metaverse infrastructure company just as ChatGPT was released in 2022. Much to Rene’s chagrin, the programmers he worked with weren’t interested in experimenting with artificial intelligence.
«My chief engineer said, ‘If you ask me to use AI again, I’m quitting,’» Tursios said. So he immediately shut down the company and started going to hackathons to figure out how to use AI on his own.
His first victory at a hackathon awakened his thirst for competition, and he began looking for the best tactics for winning at such events.
«He was at every hackathon. He started winning and just kept working his way to the top,» said Collin Lowenburg, a programmer and hackathon organizer who used to see Tursios all the time at AGI House, Founders Inc., Frontier Tower and other hackathon venues in San Francisco.
René Turcios is now known for his ability to quickly create software. Companies come to him to commission projects that would take software development teams weeks, and he does them in a matter of hours. He has started hosting workshops to teach experienced software developers how to make the most of artificial intelligence in coding.
Tursios recently cut back on his busy hackathon schedule to focus on building his own AI agent startup. He now doesn’t hire programmers—all the coding is done by AI.
As a reminder, vibe coding is increasingly appearing in tech job postings. Visa, Reddit, and other companies are looking to hire people with this skill to accelerate product development.
