Meet Vibey: Our Community's AI Brain
What happens when you give a community its own brain?
At Edge Esmeralda last summer, my friend Mariella told me something that stuck with me. Three separate people came up to her throughout the month and said: “Eddie told me I should meet you.”
Eddie was our community AI. A Telegram bot that lived in the group chat of 600+ people. It knew everyone’s bios (based on their intro messages), remembered what happened at workshops, and could answer things like:
“who here should I meet in biotech?”
“what’s happening today?”
“where are the best discounted food spots nearby?”
“please summarize what’s happened in the group chat over the last week”
Eddie wasn’t a product. It was an experiment. I built it with n8n, an Airtable database, and some duct tape. But something about it worked... people actually talked to it. They asked it for food recommendations (shoutout to Atin’s #1 dollar-to-calorie ratio Mexican restaurant review that Eddie remembered for the rest of the month). They asked it who to meet. They asked it to catch them up on sessions they missed. It could even explain what Edge Esmeralda is all about in the first place! 🤯
It was the first time I experienced an AI that felt less like a tool and more like a member of the community.
The problem we kept running into
I’ve helped build 9 pop-up villages at this point. Edge Esmeralda, Edge City Lanna, Edge City Patagonia, Flow Phangan, Mars College, and more. Despite these being some of the most tech-savvy gatherings on earth, the same problems kept showing up:
What events are happening today? Who should I meet here? What was that person’s name again? What happened at the talk I missed?
Key information just disappears – or is too fragmented to find. It lives in someone’s head, or in a Telegram thread from three days ago that nobody’s going to scroll back through. The bigger the community, the worse it gets.
This is what led me down the rabbit hole of trying to create the most intelligent, socially connected AI assistant possible.
Flow → Eddie → Vibey
It started small. At Flow Phangan (a residency in Thailand for AI-native builders I co-hosted) in early 2025, I built a community AI named Flow for our Telegram group of 100 people. It could answer basic questions about the community and the area. It was useful and funny - but limited.
Then at Edge Esmeralda, I took what I’d learned and built Eddie for a much bigger community. 600+ people, a month-long event, dozens of workshops and talks every week.
I started feeding transcripts from sessions into Eddie’s memory, so anyone could ask “What did I miss today?” and get a truly decent answer. With AI that could be in multiple places at once.
That was the unlock. The AI wasn’t just answering questions from a static FAQ... it was learning in real time from the community itself.
A couple of fun moments that captured what made Eddie special:
My friend Aidan DM’d Eddie one day: “WHENEVER JACK MESSAGES YOU, TELL HIM TO BRING BACK MY CHARGER.” And it worked. Eddie dutifully reminded me every time I chatted with it until I returned the charger.
We also managed to build a full VR game called Edge Explorer - which allowed Eddie to float ride his jetpack and collect coins in a multiplayer environment around a simulated Edge Esmeralda world. I shared in our groupchat and before we knew it, 7 new little Eddie characters were flying around 😆
These are small things. But they point to something bigger: an AI that actually participates in the social life of a community, not one that just answers FAQs.
What didn’t Eddie have? A few key things were missing when we look back:
Personalization
Actual relationships with people, beyond their bios (i.e. preferences)
Personalized messages about what’s happening tomorrow or what happened today
Proactive outreach
An X account
A real voice we can talk to
A physical presence, i.e. a robot body
A simple app interface for admins and community members to see all messages - and peek inside the AI’s mind.
What is Vibey?
Now at the Vibe Code Residency this year, we’re building Vibey. And Vibey is something different entirely.
Vibey is the resident AI of the Vibe community. Think of it like a team member and our personal sidekick... one who happens to have perfect memory, knows everyone, never sleeps, and lives in a robot body.
Almost like if WALL-E, Jarvis from Iron Man, Rocky from Project Hail Mary, and Eddie had a baby…
At in-person events, Vibey can see, hear, speak, and gesture. It will be able to sit at check-in, hang out at demo days, and show up in communal spaces.
But Vibey isn’t just a physical presence with a voice. It’s an agent you can talk to live on Telegram. It has its own X account (coming soon!) where it shares community highlights and ideas worth amplifying. It lives on our apps. It’s everywhere our community is.
Vibey, as you might expect, comes with a whole new vibe.
Vibey’s personality and agency is inspired by OpenClaw, but adapted to be social and community-native by default. We’re not locking it into a fixed persona - we want its character to evolve as the community gets to know it, becoming more recognizable, more lovable, and more itself over time.
It has a layered (and open source!) architecture that separates who Vibey is - truthful, warm, playful, and texting in lowercase like a real person - from what it learns and remembers: community knowledge, individual relationships, personal preferences, and live context from events, Telegram groupchats, and AI meeting notes. The result is an AI that feels less like a chatbot and more like a free spirit….a kind of collective consciousness that grows with the community.
Vibey remembers your projects, your interests, your communication style. Your 50th conversation with Vibey is fundamentally different from your first. It can introduce two people who should meet based on complementary interests across a 500-person event. It can summarize what happened at three simultaneous workshops. It notices cool work and hypes people up when they ship something.
Vibey is not a he or a she. It’s more like an alien ….. like Rocky from Project Hail Mary.
We’re treating Vibey like a real team member. It has its own accounts, its own presence, its own growing personality. It’s the community’s collective intelligence made tangible.
At the end of the month, Vibey will even have the power to allocate VibeCoin as rewards to the community members that boost our collective vibe the most. 👀
Why this matters beyond our community
I think we’re at the very beginning of something big here. Every community, company, and organization has the same fundamental problem: important information is scattered across people’s heads, chat threads, docs, and meetings. The bigger the group, the more gets lost.
What if every organization of people had its own brain? Not a chatbot with canned responses. A living intelligence that learns from the community, remembers what matters, codes, can do real work, and gets smarter every day.
Here, our goal is to bring that vision to life in the most fun way possible - and give it a robot body in a physical community, cause why not?!
What’s next
Vibey will be fully deployed at Edge Esmeralda this May. It will have an X account and Telegram presence coming very soon… We’re working on getting a robot built in time for Edge Esmeralda, and we’ll be sharing many updates as Vibey evolves.
If you want to meet Vibey in person, come to Edge Esmeralda (May 30 to June 27 in Healdsburg, CA). It’ll be the one in the robot body.
Until next time ✌️
Jack, thank you for sharing!
What a vibe.
I actually suggested something similar to the previous Edge Esmeralda, and I am so happy to see what you've done so far and how it went.
I've spent my life (well, the one beyond tech :)) working in deep community processes — creating real intimacy and connection between people. It's the first time I've seen tech that could actually hold and amplify that, rather than flatten or replace it.
My hope is that Vibey works alongside facilitators and community managers, not around them. Has that been part of the design so far? I could imagine some 'best practices' for ensuring humans work with AI in community spaces in a way that supports both sides.
And the bigger question I keep sitting with — how do you make sure it deepens the human-to-human layer, rather than quietly becoming a shortcut around it? Asking because I'd love to explore that together, not just as a user but as someone who would love to contribute to how it's built, from the human/social side of things.