Support vibe-qc

vibe-qc is free and open-source software (MPL 2.0), developed and maintained by one person on personal hardware. Development happens on a MacBook. Test calculations run on a personal gaming PC. The server that hosts vibe-qc.com, the GitLab repository, and the CI/CD pipeline is self-hosted and self-funded.

There is no institutional backing, no grant, no university compute allocation. If vibe-qc is useful to you — or if you think the Cyclic Cluster Model reaching CCSD(T) accuracy on a publicly available open-source code is worth existing — consider supporting the project.

About the author

I am a computational chemist with a PhD from the Mulliken Center for Theoretical Chemistry in Bonn. My thesis work focused on solid-state quantum chemistry: I developed the pob-TZVP basis sets for periodic calculations with CRYSTAL (Peintinger, Vilela Oliveira, Bredow, J. Comput. Chem. 34, 451, 2013) and implemented the Cyclic Cluster Model at the Hartree-Fock level as a proof of concept (Peintinger, Bredow, J. Comput. Chem. 35, 839, 2014 — free-access cover article). Both papers — and the rest of my publication history — are on my Google Scholar profile.

After my postdoc I left academia for the steel industry, where I work today. vibe-qc is a hobby project, developed in the evenings and on weekends. That context matters for understanding what it is and where it is going.

vibe-qc is a modern reimplementation of the ideas behind that PhD work, rebuilt from scratch using current tools and without the constraints of a thesis timeline. The long-term goal is to take the Cyclic Cluster Model as far up the post-Hartree-Fock ladder as I can reasonably get: MP2-CCM, local MP2, CCSD, and eventually CCSD(T), with projection-based embedding for the environment. That would mean correlated quantum chemistry on solid-state defects at a cost that scales with cluster size rather than unit cell size, available to anyone with a pip install. I wrote about how the first day of development went here: I vibe-coded a quantum-chemical program in one day.

The code is being built in the open using Claude as the implementation engine and my domain expertise as the steering wheel. What used to take months of PhD-level implementation work — interfacing integral libraries, writing parallel code, hunting down wrong signs in density matrices — now takes hours. The science is still hard. The implementation overhead is no longer the bottleneck. That asymmetry is what makes this tractable as a hobby.

What your sponsorship funds

Right now

  • Claude Max subscription (~$200/month) — the AI coding assistant that is the direct engine of development. Without it, vibe-qc does not get built at the current pace.

  • Self-hosted server costs — vibe-qc.com, the GitLab repository, and the CI/CD pipeline all run on personal hardware.

Near-term goal

  • A MacBook Pro with M5 Pro. The current development machine handles small calculations but struggles with larger periodic systems and parallel builds. More unified memory would meaningfully expand what gets tested during development.

Long-term goal

  • A small compute cluster — for CI benchmarks, cross-checks against reference codes on real ionic crystals, and eventually multi-node MPI runs as vibe-qc moves toward the Cyclic Cluster Model at correlated levels of theory.

How to support

💚 GitHub Sponsors

Recurring monthly support. Zero fees. Preferred for ongoing contributors.

https://github.com/sponsors/mpeintinger
☕ Ko-fi

One-time donations. No GitHub account required.

https://ko-fi.com/mpeintinger

Sponsors who choose to be public are listed on the dedicated sponsors page.

Other ways to help

  • Star the repository on GitLab.

  • Report bugs and install failures via GitLab Issues — the v0.4 bug arc showed that non-dev machines surface problems the dev machine never will.

  • Contribute a tutorial — the format is documented in the tutorial guide.

  • Cite vibe-qc in publications — see the citation guide for the software citation, the pob-TZVP basis paper to cite when you use those basis sets, and the libint / libxc / spglib references. The repository ships a CITATION.cff that GitLab and citation managers parse automatically.

  • Spread the word — if you work in computational chemistry or solid-state physics and vibe-qc covers your use case, telling colleagues is genuinely useful.