A U.S. Air Force cadet with no coding experience used vibe-coding — relying entirely on AI chatbot prompts — to build a military software prototype over three months as part of the DAF-MIT AI Accelerator Phantom Program. Using Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, he built ROMAD-AI, a document-processing tool for tactical mission planning. The project revealed that AI chatbots can help nontechnical users prototype software but fall short for production use, especially with sensitive data. Key lessons include the importance of breaking problems into small steps, managing chatbot context drift, and the necessity of code review to catch security issues — such as documents being sent to a remote AI model instead of processed locally.
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