Vibe Coding is a Video Game with Real-World Rewards.

Full episode:

Transcript: “The way a video game is designed is that it keeps you hooked by giving you feedback and rewards for doing work. And it’s always at the edge of your capability. So as you get better, the video game gets harder. It’s not so hard that it’s frustrating, but it’s not so easy that it’s boring. So you’re always operating at the edge of your capability with a video game and getting these rewards. But those rewards are fake, and the video game is bounded. It’s created by other humans. It’s sort of a fake little world, and deep down you kind of know that. So you’re just figuring out the rules of the game. And then once you’ve figured out the rules of the game, it’s boring. Except with vibe coding, it’s unbounded because now you’ve got a Turing machine running underneath. You can build anything. The objective is created by you and can keep expanding, so it kind of never fills up completely. And it has real-world relevance. It’s not just some fake world for fake people or fake games that you’re solving, so it’s way more interesting. So vibe coding has one-shotted a whole bunch of my friends who have disappeared into vibe coding the apps they’ve wanted. But it really, really helps to have a clear direction. You have to know what you want—that’s actually the hardest thing—and having a very clear vision of it. And I have that, because it’s a particular app that I was obsessed with for about a year called Airchat—which I built with a team—and it was a social messenger for people to talk through voice and video. It didn’t quite work, so we sold it off, got the investors their money back, and got the team some nice packages. But I remember that experience as being exhilarating because I was building a product that I wanted and I was working with a brilliant team. But I had to work through a team to do it. I had eight or nine engineers, depending on the day, and we worked pretty hard for nine to 12 months, and we shipped a couple of variations. But with vibe coding, I am basically rebuilding that app. I’m rebuilding from scratch. But the key now is: I’m rebuilding it exactly the way that I want it. There’s no compromises. And normally, in the act of building anything with a team, there’s always compromises—even if you are not aware of them. Even if you’re the dictator in charge, which you rarely are, you still have to just accommodate other people. You can’t say, “Move this icon left. Now move it right. No, move it back. No, move it back again.” You can’t do that. You’ll annoy the engineer. You can’t demand things where you don’t have a reasonable justification—where it’s just a gut feel or an intuition. But the beauty with an AI coding agent is there’s none of that. It’s like a self-driving car. You don’t feel self-conscious in a self-driving car because there isn’t a driver sitting there. The same way, with an autonomous coding agent, you don’t feel self-conscious about your own idiosyncrasies. So you can create exactly the thing that you want. I think one of the nice benefits of vibe coding is that—although we may not see like super high-quality code (at least not in this generation), and the architecture needs a lot of work, and these things may have security holes, and they may be hard to scale—the prototyping that you’re going to get, the individual apps you’re going to get, is going to be very fast and they’re going to be true to the vision of the creator. There’s going to be no compromises. So you may end up with more things like Minecraft—which Notch famously coded by himself—where there was one person’s vision. And it may have looked weird because like, “What is this blocky graphics? It’s like a huge step backwards.” But he didn’t have to compromise. He didn’t have to communicate with anybody or explain to anybody why he wanted it that way. So I think it expands the scope of discovery. It’s also incredibly fun. It takes the number of people who might have built apps from like 0.1 percent to one or two or three percent in the populace. Don’t get me wrong—the majority of people are not going to code their own apps. For the majority of people, computers are sort of this magic black box and who knows what was going on in there anyway. So the fact that it’s become 10x or 100x easier still doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s still a black box. But for the people who are creative, who are self-motivated, and who are articulate and have a good vision, you can code now. There’s nobody standing in between you and your prototype. And yes, if you go to market with a high-functioning app and you need to scale to a lot of users and all of that, then you want to recruit a great team and you want to get real engineers on board, and you’re probably going to have to rewrite the whole thing. But if you’re experimenting, you’re prototyping, you’re getting to market, there’s nothing better.”

Still, I think you need basic knowledge of computer hardware/software; otherwise, you will hit that wall at some point.

@LilysAI_ 요약

Wait, this is legit by @naval?

This is the best distillation I’ve seen of how agentic engineering is in reality and you can only understand any of this if you’re actively building. That’s why I always say code agents are the factorio of software engineering. The features and code always grows there’s no limitations

and the wild part is when you record yourself playing the game and put it on youtube you get a second reward layer on top. people are literally watching other people vibe code apps and subscribing for more

for sure the way it feels I stopped playing any digital games since I switched to AI

Do you need to understand the principles of coding to be a successful vibe coder?

It does make sense to me. If you know what you want and you can give it enough context it feels even better than playing a game you got good at. Because like said here, you get "real world rewards"

I love that the phrase “it’s like a self driving car” is a thing now

Airchat was legendary. #blessed

so good

Naval check out GRIDS. It eliminates passwords and can be implemented in the machine economy. Let me know what you think.

The new Skinner Box

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that people are so excited and happy about reducing communication costs and not having to compromise with others? I don't know.

Wait - didn’t @naval also say that vibecoding an app is the new podcasting. And now he starts a podcast, beginning with vibecoding lol

the loop pulls people in faster than learning to code did. browser-based vibe coders like mk0r compress idea-to-working-app-someone-uses to under a minute, which is shorter than most game tutorials.

Love this!!!

is it AI voice-overed also?

You are leaving out that you are bleeding your pockets in reality

"you can't keep changing the location of a button back and forth, you'll annoy the engineer" so true lol

This is an excellent analogy.

What's that? I should've gone outside?