Naval

AI is turning the Internet into the Library of Babel. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34…

Careers are dead. Jobs are dying. Opportunities arising.

All the American AI companies talk about sharing the wealth, but all the top open source models are Chinese.

Vibe coding is here. Vibe research is next.

We’re now in the era of slop code.

Creativity is the antidote to scarcity.

Vibe Coding Is the New Product Management “There’s been a shift—a marked pronouncement in the last year and especially in the last few months—most pronounced by Claude Code, which is a specific model that has a coding engine in it, which is so good that I think now you have vibe coders, which are people who didn’t really code much or hadn’t coded in a long time, who are using essentially English as a programming language—as an input into this code bot—which can do end-to-end coding. Instead of just helping you debug things in the middle, you can describe an application that you want. You can have it lay out a plan, you can have it interview you for the plan. You can give it feedback along the way, and then it’ll chunk it up and will build all the scaffolding. It’ll download all the libraries and all the connectors and all the hooks, and it’ll start building your app and building test harnesses and testing it. And you can keep giving it feedback and debugging it by voice, saying, “This doesn’t work. That works. Change this. Change that,” and have it build you an entire working application without your having written a single line of code. For a large group of people who either don’t code anymore or never did, this is mind-blowing. This is taking them from idea space, and opinion space, and from taste directly into product. So that’s what I mean—product management has taken over coding. Vibe coding is the new product management. Instead of trying to manage a product or a bunch of engineers by telling them what to do, you’re now telling a computer what to do. And the computer is tireless. The computer is egoless, and it’ll just keep working. It’ll take feedback without getting offended. You can spin up multiple instances. It’ll work 24/7 and you can have it produce working output. What does that mean? Just like now anybody can make a video or anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don’t have one already in the App Store, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to what we’re going to see. However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used or they’re competitive? No. I think it’s going to break into two kinds of things. First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there’s no demand for average. Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job. So first of all, you just have more shots on goal. So there will be more of the best. There will be a lot more niches getting filled. You might have wanted an application for a very specific thing, like tracking lunar phases in a certain context, or a certain kind of personality test, or a very specific kind of video game that made you nostalgic for something. Before, the market just wasn’t large enough to justify the cost of an engineer coding away for a year or two. But now the best vibe coding app might be enough to scratch that itch or fill that slot. So a lot more niches will get filled, and as that happens, the tide will rise. The best applications—those engineers themselves are going to be much more leveraged. They’ll be able to add more features, fix more bugs, smooth out more of the edges. So the best applications will continue to get better. A lot more niches will get filled. And even individual niches—such as you want an app that’s just for your own very specific health tracking needs, or for your own very specific architectural layout or design—that app that could have never existed will now exist.”

New podcast on AI (full episode). Links below. A Motorcycle for the Mind 0:00 If you want to learn, do 2:13 Vibe coding is the new product management 6:49 Training models is the new coding 10:13 Is traditional software engineering dead? 13:07 There is no demand for average 14:12 The hottest new programming language is English 18:36 AI is adapting to us faster than we are adapting to it 22:56 No entrepreneur is worried about AI taking their job 26:46 The goal is not to have a job 29:49 AIs are not alive 32:55 AI fails the only true test of intelligence 36:49 Early adopters of AI have an enormous edge 39:37 AI meets you exactly where you are 43:02 Always leverage the best intelligence 44:37 If you can't define it, you can't program it 49:37 The solution to AI anxiety is action

Nothing worse than a slow failure.

Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding.

“Software is eating the world, and now AI is eating software.”

Marketing is a creative and adversarial game. Channels get discovered, exploited, and discarded. New products need new distribution. It’s hard to hire rule-breakers, so the best marketers tend to be the founders themselves.

The cost of code is coming down, so we will consume more of it. The productivity of coders is going up, so they will become more valuable. Coding now includes training and driving models.

Good taste is judgement refined through creation and criticism - criticism not just from flawed proxies like people and awards, but criticism from nature and free markets.

There is unlimited demand for intelligence.

There’s no point in learning custom tools, workflows, or languages anymore.

Good Products are Opinionated. “Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. @Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”