Memento Mori — Vibe Coding

Memento mori. I think I remember the first time I came across this Latin phrase. It was while doing some research about the movie Memento by Christopher Nolan. I had been fascinated by the film, and after digging a bit, I discovered that its inspiration came from a short story written by his brother, titled Memento Mori.

But it was much later, while watching a video by Fabien Olicard, that I really dove into the meaning and spirit behind that credo. Memento mori — it means “Don’t forget that you’re going to die.”

They say its origin goes back to classical antiquity. Back then, a slave would stand behind a victorious general to remind him that, despite his great victories, he was still just a man — that his glory, his life, everything would pass. Death would come for him too.

It’s the idea of time passing, and the fact that we are far from eternal.

💡 Realization

When Fabien Olicard talked about it in his video, it made me realize just how fleeting life really is. Our time here — the ability to experience, to create, to love, to live, to learn — this ability is not forever.

🧪 Where the project idea came from

That’s the mindset that led me to vibe code, a pretty simple site designed to let anyone explore the feeling of time passing.

Goal: Based on a few inputs, give someone an idea of how much time they realistically have left.

I didn’t have much time to dedicate to the project, and I wanted something fast. So I turned to a current trend: vibe coding.

💻 What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is an approach to programming assisted by artificial intelligence, recently introduced by one of OpenAI’s cofounders (Andrej Karpathy).

The idea is simple: you give instructions in a prompt to an AI, and let it generate the code for you. You iterate, prompt after prompt — asking for what you want, until you get the final result you’re aiming for.

🛠️ How I set it up

For vibe code, I fell back on a simple environment that included:

• 🧮 VScodium (VS Code on Linux)
• 🤖 Roo Code (AI agent plugin for VS Code)
• 🔑 ChatGPT (API Key, model 4o)

Once I had my environment set up, all I had to do was feed instructions into the prompt, and my code was generated. Just like that.

I’ll admit, sometimes to get a visual I liked, I had to manually tweak the code or grab a few snippets from Codepen and integrate them into the project. Even if the goal was to move super fast, the look and feel was still important to me.

🎯 The Result

In the end, I had a working website with the following flow:

• 📄 I use a JSON file pulled from worldpopulationreview.com, which contains life expectancy by gender and country.
• ⚖️ I apply some simple bonus or penalty points based on lifestyle habits: 🚬 Smoker = -5 years, 😰 High stress = -2 years… etc.

The rest is just basic math. The final result on the counter shows the actual free time left — excluding sleep, work hours, and commute time.

It tells you how much real, usable time you’ll have left to do the things that really matter: personal projects, travel, family, friends, and what gives your life meaning.

🧱 Just the beginning

In a future post, I might dive a bit deeper into the project structure if that’s something you’d like to see.

In the meantime, I invite you to visit the site and try the test yourself — see how much real time you have left…

But most importantly:

🎙️ Make every second speak for something.