“Vibe” coding? Try vape coding.
Either the most sober — or the most nicotine-addled — individual of all time has done the improbable: hosting an entire website on a single disposable e-cigarette.
According to programmer Bogdan Ionescu, it’s a stunt that’s meant to demonstrate just how ridiculously tricked out even one-and-done vapes have become, he shared on his blog last week.
Ionescu said he had been collecting disposable vapes for years, but it was only last year that he realized that some of these “fancier pacifiers for adults” came with surprisingly capable microcontrollers from ARM, the same manufacturer that makes the processors used in MacBooks.
It’s capable — in relative terms, at least. According to Ionescu, it’s a microcontroller “so bad, it’s basically disposable.” But, in 2025, that still means it has a ridiculous amount of computing power, at least for something that get thrown out after a week.
He didn’t share the specific vape — so as to not do “free advertising for Big Tobacco,” as he phrased it — but the one he chose came with 24 kibibtyes of flash storage (a kibibyte is basically a kilobyte) and three kibibytes of static ram, all with a 24 megahertz processor.
“You may look at those specs and think that it’s not much to work with,” Ionescu wrote. “I don’t blame you, a 10 [year] old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower.”
“I on the other hand,” he declared, “see a blazingly fast web server.”
It took some trial and error before it could achieve these blazing speeds.
At first, “pings took ~1.5s with 50 percent packet loss,” Ionescu said, “and a simple page took over 20 [seconds] to load.”
“That’s so bad, it’s actually funny,” he said, “and I kind of wanted to leave it there.”
But after he fixed an issue with his code that caused the program to only read a single character at a time, he unlocked the vape’s true potential.
“Pings now take 20ms, no packet loss and a full page loads in about 160ms,” Ionescu rejoiced. “Now this is what I call blazingly fast!”
The stunt raises a pretty important question: if these are devices advanced enough to power a whole website, why are they designed to be thrown away? One study estimated that vapes and other tiny consumer items add up to a staggering 9 million metric tons of e-waste every year. Is it reasonable that some of these have touch screens and can even run Twitter?
“I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as ‘disposable,'” Ionescu wrote. “Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon.”
If you want to access the vape-powered website, you can visit this link, though it doesn’t appear to be working at the moment. Maybe it’s taking a smoke break. Such are the perils of hosting something on the (vape) cloud.
More on vapes: We Talked to the Inventors of the “Tamagotchi” Vape That Dies If You Stop Puffing
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