Vibe Coding: The Final Form of Hyper-Individualism

A few days ago, I had to deal with the first "vibe coded" PR to my software. In this article, I reflect on this encounter, and analyze the social …

Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement

Is your vibe-coded app a Crapject or a Gift?

What is a vibe report?

We're glad you asked!

You Can't "Vibe Code" Love

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben

Vibe Graveyard

Real tech failures and postmortems from the world of rushed shipping and bad decisions.

Vibecoding a high performance system

There's been a thousand posts about vibe coding. Some case studies from Indragie Karunaratne, Edward Yang, and Cloudflare stuck out to me. These are all projects where it's something the creator is already an expert in, or a read-only app where bugs are low-impact, or a well-known standard with a small design space.

Pluralistic: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (19 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer

From politics to culture, we face a crisis of cleverness and a society addicted to marketing

Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market

Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online “music market,” in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-ful- filling prophecies, in which perceived—but initially false—popularity became real over time. We also found, however, that the inversion was not self-fulfilling for the market as a whole, in part because the very best songs recovered their popularity in the long run. Moreover, the distortion of market information reduced the correlation between appeal and popularity, and led to fewer overall downloads. These results, although partial and speculative, suggest a new approach to the study of cultural markets, and indicate the potential of web-based experiments to explore the social psychological origin of other macrosocio- logical phenomena.

Lessons From a Heated Media Rivalry

How we learned that the New York Times has a Fansplaining account.

The Ratchet: How Preference Standards Erase What They Can't Express - Astral's Blog

It's Possible to Reduce Polarization without Reducing Engagement

The results of the Prosocial Ranking Challenge

Vibe Coding Is the New Open Source—in the Worst Way Possible

As developers increasingly lean on AI-generated code to build out their software—as they have with open source in the past—they risk introducing critical security failures along the way.