Vibe coding is the ability to create software programs without knowing how to code.

Using natural language alone, we can use a variety of tools to prompt our way to a working piece of software.

Just last week, I created 5 small applets to automate mundane tasks.

Four out of five worked surprisingly well. The fifth? A total nightmare.

My background programming calculators in assembly language in middle school helps me get out of some technical jams that might stop others, but I wouldn’t call myself a full-stack engineer.

At the moment, vibe coding allows us to do just enough to be truly dangerous. To fool ourselves momentarily into thinking that we could prompt our way to the next Spotify or Netflix.

But the minute things get complex (and they always get complex), we’re standing alone in rural China without a translator.

It’s tantalizing, maddening, exciting, and terrifying. And we’ll need skilled engineers for the foreseeable future.

Still… Getting closer.

Alt title: Why would you pay $1,000 for something you'll never use?

Imagine the scenario…

You’re driving your family of four down the road, when suddenly, a thick, inescapable fog rolls in.

You can no longer see 10 feet in front of you, but you gather that all the other cars on the road are starting to panic. You hear faint screams from behind car glass, screeching tires, and you sense that the situation is spinning out of control.

In a moment of brilliance, you remember that you purchased the car package with fog lights. You switch them on, and suddenly instead of seeing 10 feet in front of you, you see 15 feet. Just enough to spare your family’s lives. “Well worth the extra $1,000 I paid,” you say, forever thankful that you made the sensible choice.

I can only imagine some variation of this mental scenario is why anyone agrees to the up-charge of the fog-light package when purchasing a new car. But does it ever happen? Do you ever even switch these lights on once after leaving the lot?

Compared to $40k for a new car, only $1k extra for the fog light package seems like no big deal! But compared to zero, $1,000 is a tremendous waste of money.

Car manufacturers know and exploit this human weakness. As a consumer, be aware of add-ons. As a seller? Understand the enormous power of hypothetical situations that will never materialize.

Proof that the singularity has passed will start becoming more evident.

If you notice that some people seem to be getting more and more productive.

Posting more and more.

Showing up more and more...

And if you’re wondering "how does she do it!?" the answer is increasingly “AI”.

Two productivity classes will emerge, those on board, and those not. It’s not a judgment. It’s just what’s happening.

The trick for all of us is to know where to use AI, and where to be human.

(Hint: None of these posts are written with AI.)

Today’s AI is generative. We know that. But like “agentic” or even “AI” itself, these words have already lost all meaning.

A couple years ago, "we marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." (Yes, that was Morpheus).

Unlike the clunky chatbots of the AOL days, today’s models can easily pass the Turing Test.

And what makes them special is their ability to generate—to

synthesize.

But as we collectively ask ourselves what human value will soon be, after Sam Altman’s first million humanoid robots start building themselves, the easiest question to ask ourselves right now is: Am *I* generative?

Am I creating things that add value to the world? Or am I just observing it?

As every procrastinator knows well, there’s a huge gap between being able to generate, and generating.

Don’t let AI be the only generative one in the room.

Alt title: “Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

We see it all around us in spaces lovingly referred to as the Manosphere, that many continue to believe that sigma/alpha/beta males and females are a thing.

That victory goes to the strongest. The loudest. The angriest. The one with the fullest beard and most chiseled jawline. The one who downs 16 raw eggs for breakfast then runs up and down Philadelphia. Basically, Rocky meets Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

But evolution does not necessarily reward such things. Plenty of loud, angry, and exceptionally strong beings are now extinct—beings much stronger and angrier and more aggressive than even our most dominant alpha-bro.

And yet the Grand Canyon remains. Forged by a river quietly doing its unassuming thing for ages.

Darwin saw that evolution didn’t necessarily favor the strongest, but the most adaptable.

We are living in a time of rapid evolution, perhaps the most rapid in the history of our species.

It’s the most adaptable among us that will survive and thrive.

And I know it’s not 1991 anymore, but spoiler alert: Gaston didn’t get the girl.