Earlier this month, I stumbled upon this post from 2020:

In the summer of 2020, during peak covid, Twitter user @sharifshameem got access to a non-public version of GPT-3 by OpenAI. This was two years before the release of ChatGPT and during the time, when GitHub started to build the first version of GitHub Copilot.

So at this time, Sharif built a frontend around GPT-3, that served as an interface for building react apps, with GPT!

Looking back, this was actually very innovative and a small glimpse towards a (then) possible future that arrived with the release of ChatGPT and later on with the rise of vibe-coding.

At that time this post also generated a lot of controversy and discussion on sites such as Twitter, HackerNews and Reddit, where people openly asked whether the whole thing was fake.

Today in 2026 the original website debuild.co is offline. However, Sharif is working at OpenAI and in the past years many people took the original idea behind debuild.co and built AI-based Website/App generators, even taking these ideas further with vibe coding and agentic coding.