Before the new year, I set myself a goal: file a Provisional Patent Application in the US for a technology I’d been working on. I’m an engineer, not a lawyer. I’d never filed a patent before.
Spoiler — it worked. Status: Patent Pending.
Why the old model is broken
The traditional path has two options, and both are bad.
A patent attorney costs $10,000–15,000, takes months, and often doesn’t understand the technical nuances of your code. You spend half the engagement explaining what your system actually does.
ChatGPT writes beautiful text that falls apart under real scrutiny. It produces things that look like patent claims but wouldn’t survive a first-round office action. It doesn’t know how to stress-test its own output.
I needed a third option.
The method: vibe patenting
Instead of asking AI to write a patent, I built a system where AI agents try to kill the patent.
The idea is adversarial by design. You describe your invention in plain language. Then a swarm of agents attacks it from every legal angle — anticipation under §102, obviousness under §103, indefiniteness under §112. If your idea survives, it becomes a claim. If it doesn’t, the agents tell you why and force a pivot.
When I did this manually over the holidays, the process ran for five days. The agents conducted 527 micro-research queries and destroyed 34 versions of my idea. Only the 35th survived — draft #27 — and it passed the full validation loop.
I wrote up the methodology as a step-by-step guide: The Deep Research Patent Protocol. With the ready algorithm, the path from idea to a properly formatted USPTO-compliant PDF takes about 24 hours instead of five days.
Then I automated it
The manual process worked, but it was tedious. So I built VibePatent — a desktop app that runs the entire pipeline automatically.
You describe your idea. Four AI agents take over:
The Orchestrator coordinates the workflow. The Architect writes patent claims. The Examiner plays the role of a hostile USPTO expert whose only job is to destroy everything. The Investigator searches existing patents across USPTO, Google Patents, and academic databases.
These agents run inside the Kill Chain — an engine that puts your idea through 7 rounds of adversarial validation, each from a different legal angle. The signal system is simple: green light means white space (no prior art threat), yellow means a near miss (refine and retry), red means a direct hit (pivot to a new draft).
The whole thing runs locally on your machine. Your idea never touches anyone’s servers except the AI providers you choose to use — with your own API keys. Keys are encrypted via OS Keychain. There’s a Content Security Policy, path validation, sandboxing. 146 tests, CI on GitHub Actions, security audit passed.
The numbers
The traditional route: $10,000–15,000 for a patent attorney.
VibePatent: about $4 per run in API costs. Anthropic (Claude) handles the heavy lifting — claim drafting, examination, coordination. Perplexity handles prior art search. Gemini assists with large-context threat analysis.
Total budget: $65–80 in AI subscriptions for a month of active use.
What it’s good for (and what it’s not)
This works well for software, AI, SaaS, and algorithm patents — domains where prior art is digitally accessible and searchable.
It does not work for chemistry, pharma, or biotech, where historical patent data isn’t always available online and the technical requirements are fundamentally different.
The important disclaimers
This is not a magic button. If your idea is derivative and the process can’t find novel formulations, the agents will say “stop.” That’s a feature, not a bug — it saves you the filing fee and months of false hope.
No guarantees. The method produces the strongest possible provisional application, but the final decision always belongs to the USPTO, roughly a year later.
This is a tool, not a lawyer. Before filing a non-provisional application, consult a patent attorney.
It’s open source
VibePatent is released under Apache 2.0. The stack is Electron + React + TypeScript + Claude + Perplexity + Gemini. Do whatever you want with it.
github.com/nikmcfly/vibepatent
If it’s useful — star the repo. PRs welcome.
If you have questions, reach out. Links are on the homepage.