MEMEMTO MORI - VIBE CODING

Moudiongui Martin
Jul 18
3 min read

Updated: Aug 11

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 level = -2 years
- … etc.

The rest is just basic math.

The final result on the counter shows the actual free time left.

It excludes sleep, work hours, and commute time. Basically, it tells you how much real, usable time you’ll have left to do the things that really matter to you: 💼 Work on personal projects🧳 Travel👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Be with family👫 Hang out with friends🧘 Do what gives your life meaning