Vibe Coding a House

My Laziest Post Yet

I’m doing an experiment and dictating this with Wispr Flow to maximize my laziness so I don’t have to type. So, expect this post to be a lot more rambly than usual.

Back in the 90s there was this weird home software program called 3D Home Architect. One of those things that’s just absurdly too ambitious. Expected every single person to architect and design their own home with nothing more than this shitty 90s PC. You didn’t get any training at all, except I guess whatever manual came with it, plus the in-game help menu.

It was oddly successful. It sold a lot and people seemed to really enjoy the concept of just playing around with it and designing their own home. I don’t know if anyone actually used it to build a home but it’s funny to think about.

Of course there’s more sophisticated versions of this, but they still seem like fundamentally the same concept. You still have to click and drag and move things around just to get a limited 3D view. This one is “Sweet Home 3D.”

Most people enjoy the concept of daydreaming about different home designs but we don’t actually want to do the work of drawing up blueprints. Most of us aren’t really architects and have never studied it.

But why should that stop us? AI lets anyone be an expert on anything instantly with no effort at all, right? Let’s just do that.

The Dream is Alive With AI

I should be able to just put in a vague description of what I want the house to look like, something like “stately and elegant” or “cozy and warm,” and have it make a design based on that. Then of course I should be able to make adjustments like “make this room a little bigger” or “put in carpet instead of hardwood floors.” I should also be able to describe a budget of roughly how much money it’ll cost and how big. And I also want it to give suggestions of possibilities that I can pick through. It would start with 2D pictures, but then I’d want it to build an immersive 3D environment, ideally something I could even walk through wearing a VR headset.

That by itself would already be pretty awesome. I think people would really enjoy just being able to visualize a vague description of a house or peer through suggestions. People that enjoy browsing sites like Zillow for fun to look at other houses. I think they’d really enjoy being able to imagine changes to those houses. Probably most would just use it for fun but a few might actually use it to seriously plan out changes to their house or imagine what kind of house they want to buy.

I wonder if we could take it a step further. What if this program would not just visualize the house but actually produce a detailed set of blueprints; detailed enough that they could be used to really build the thing? It could also order any supplies necessary, or hire local contractors.

I suppose it can’t actually build the thing yet. For now, robots are still pretty shit at actually manufacturing things. 3D printing tends to work best for small objects, not so much for large structural pieces. But the long-term dream of course would be to have robots that physically build the thing according to our design. If anybody has any ideas on how that could be made possible, please let me know in the comments!

Someone please make this concept a reality so that I can save the effort of blueprinting a house!