Vibe coding and playable memes
I originally missed Andrej Karpathy’s description of vibe coding, which is a term I like enormously (not least because it describes how I write these newsletters):
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists… It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
In many ways it reminds of how a lot of music production happens today. If you watched the recent FredAgain x Plaqueboymax stream on Twitch, you’ll know exactly what I mean (I can easily imagine an AI-augmented version of this pretty soon).
Andrew Chen wrote an excellent riff on this, expanding the idea to a few places including gaming. I feel like the natural conclusion of this trend is some concept of playable memes. To some degree this phenomenon already exists in UEFN and Roblox but it feels like we are pretty close to something which breaks out in an interesting way.
Andrew also makes an intriguing suggestion about where the future of actual code will come from:
Most code will be written (generated?) by the time rich. Thus, most code will be written by kids/students rather than software engineers. This is the same trend as video, photos, and other social media. Of course this seems surprising because today most software is being written by highly trained adults, who are generally time poor but money rich. This will change, and it means that over time, software will become dominated by youth culture the same way that social media is.
I haven’t seen any emerging Gen Alpha trends which support this, in fact if anything the exact opposite. But Andrew grasps a point which few investors historically have done: that the time-wealth of young audiences is a real factor in terms of cultural (and business) impact.
