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Vibe coding often gets a bad rep. “Vibe” is a euphemism for “not really thinking,” and that “not really thinking” part is accomplished by letting an AI spit all the code out in response to natural language prompts. Inexperienced programmers use it to push out half-baked apps and sabotage their own projects, and experienced ones get lulled into making rookie mistakes.
Enter one man who’s putting AI coding tools to extremely good use: Rafael Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and former professor at Syracuse University who’s made it his personal mission to foil Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a new profile in Wired — a quest that would come at great personal cost, including his university job.
Concepcion is behind a number mobile apps designed to counter ICE activities]. He started with an app to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when approached by ICE agents. To build it, he heavily used AI tools like Cursor, an AI-integrated coding environment, and ElevenLabs, a leading AI voice synthesizer.
In a quintessentially American image, Wired describes how Concepcion would spend his nights building his opus.
“Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup,” Wired wrote. “He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from [the musical] ‘Hamilton‘ as he worked.”
In a sense, Concepcion is merely leveling the playing the field: ICE leverages an AI surveillance panoptic to follow, menace, and deport civilians.
Eventually, Concepcion realized that simply educating immigrants of their rights wasn’t going to help much if ICE agents rounded them up unconstitutionally anyway. Instead, he wanted to vibe code a tool that could “stop these people from falling off a cliff, stop these people from disappearing.”
Concepcion called his overhauled app “DEICER.” It gave users the ability to report ICE activity with pins on a map, and people close to those locations would receive an alert on their phone with information including a description and photos of the ICE agents.
Per Wired, the app was downloaded more than 3,000 times within a matter of days of hitting the App Store, and peaked at 30,000 users. But with it came a barrage of death threats — so many that he started shopping for a bulletproof vest, according to the reporting.
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