Something clicked in the last couple of

weeks and the word I keep reaching for

is playfulness with AI, which is

probably not what you expect because the

AI discourse is super loud right now and

most of it to be honest is ominous. Jobs

are disappearing, deep fakes,

misinformation, existential risk, think

pieces that are anxious, comment

sections get angry. I'm not here to

dismiss that. The concerns are real and

we talk about them a fair bit on this

channel. But there's a different story

happening in parallel that we miss. It's

quieter. It's a little bit odd. And I

want to talk about that instead today.

So, vibe coding, which is using AI to

build software with natural language,

that's been possible since the earlier

part of 2025. But for most of the year,

it was still work. You had to fight the

tools. You had to babysit the AI through

the confusion. You had to debug weird

failures that made no sense. You had to

learn about databases and backend. The

friction was high enough that you had to

be serious about what you were building.

You wouldn't want to waste that effort

on something frivolous. What's shifted

in the last couple of weeks is not just

that the tools got better, although they

did. It's that the models hold context

longer. The agentic patterns have

matured. Builder platforms have gotten

more reliable. The real change is

downstream of all those individual

pieces. Right? It's like the Lego bricks

came together to make a set. The

friction has now dropped enough that

building software has stopped feeling

like work and started to feel like play.

And play produces very different things.

Last week, a service called Fable

started making the rounds. You upload a

photo of your pet and it generates a

Renaissance portrait with AI. Your dog

as a baroque duke, your cat as a Flemish

noble woman. This all sounds extremely

silly and it ships to you as a physical

print and it's ridiculous. It's

delightful and it's doing a This is not

an identify a market need and execute

story. This is a wouldn't it be funny if

story. Someone was playing. They built

the joke. The internet turned out to

have demand for it. And this is the part

that caught my attention. It's not the

economics of AI coding here. Although

the economics are real and we'll talk

about them elsewhere. The thing

underneath is that software has now

become cheap enough to make for fun and

people are making different things.

They're making weirder things, things

that come from play rather than

strategy, creative things. And

occasionally, because the internet is

vast and has appetite for nearly

anything interesting, one of those

playful things finds a huge audience,

just like Fable. The internet has always

been an infinite pool of demand. What's

new is that the cost of figuring out

that demand has collapsed. You can just

try things now. You can build the dumb

idea. You can see what happens. And if

nobody cares, all you did is lose a

weekend. And if they do care, hey, you

got something fun. There's a particular

kind of satisfaction that comes from

making something that works. You have an

idea. You figure out the pieces. At some

point, the thing you imagined becomes

something that exists because you made

it. People who build real things for a

living know this, right? Carpenters know

this. Cooks know this. I cook.

Designers, engineers. The material

varies, but the satisfaction is

recognizable. You had a vision. Now you

have a real thing. Now, for most of

software's history, this satisfaction

was gated behind years of specialized

training. The gap between I wish this

existed and I made it exist was way too

wide to cross casually. Most ideas ended

up dying in that gap. Not because they

were necessarily bad, but because the

activation energy was way too high. The

gate is open now. the bridge is

crossable and people are just walking

through and they're not just startup

founders looking for leverage. A lot of

us, frankly, I'm a vibe coder too, are

hobbyists. We're building things for fun

and we don't always have a business

model insight. Really, vibe coding is

the hobby out of 2025 and now into 2026

that nobody expected. A designer can

build a personal dashboard that shows

the phase of the moon. They can show

their Spotify listening stats. They can

show how many days until their next

vacation, and they can put it all

together in a way that's fun for them. A

retiree can automate their greenhouse

irrigation. Someone can make a browser

extension that does one absurd thing

perfectly, like log every time they find

an article that mentions cat grooming. A

friend can get a custom Telegram bot

that alerts them when concert tickets

drop. None of these are necessarily

businesses by themselves. They're just

projects. They're built for the

satisfaction of building. They're used

by the maker and maybe a few of their

friends. This is new. For most of

software's history, building required

enough specialized knowledge that it was

primarily professional. Hobbyist

programmers technically existed, but I

code for fun was a very, very niche

identity and it was not a casual weekend

activity. What's emerging now looks a

lot like what happened with photography.

Actually, taking good photos used to

require very serious expertise,

exposure, developing dark rooms. I took

that dark room class in high school. And

then cameras got easier. The smartphone

made everyone a photographer. Instagram

came along. Professional photography

still exists to be sure. But alongside a

vast amateur ecosystem of people who

just love taking pictures, software is

going through its Instagram moment. The

professionals aren't going anywhere.

Complex systems still require deep

expertise. But alongside professional

development, there's now space for a

service like Fable, for casual creation,

building for yourself, for fun, for

friends, because you had an idea and now

you can make it real. And because it's

play, people do try weird stuff. They

follow ideas wherever they go. Some of

the most interesting software I've seen

has this hobbyist energy. It's not

always polished. It's not always

scalable, but it's genuinely creative in

ways that commercial software rarely is.

And I think we need that because one of

the things I've observed about

commercial software is that it remains

stuck in a lot of the design paradigms

of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. And we

have not fully seen what AI native

enterprise software looks like. We

haven't had that injection of creative

energy. And I wonder if some of it is

going to come from people who are

playful. Here's the thing about telling

someone they can now build any app they

want. Most people say cool and then

never think of anything to build. Not

because they're uncreative, but because

most people's problems aren't software

shaped, and most don't notice when they

are. There's a concept from parkour, the

sport, called parkour vision. The

trained ability to see walls as surfaces

you can run along, gaps as spaces to

jump through, railings as pathways. We

memorably saw this with a Netflix

special uh with Alex Honold climbing uh

the Taipei Tower, right? Taipe 101. He

saw the building differently and so he

could climb it. The city looks different

to someone using parkour to traverse it

because of that vision. And software

vision is like that. Programmers are

trained to see repetitive tasks as

automation opportunities in the same way

Alex is trained to see a skyscraper as a

climbable surface. Programmers will look

at a manual workflow and think, "I can

script this." And the rest of us just

keep doing it manually. The people who

take to vibe coding aren't necessarily

technical. They're people who already

have software vision who develop it

quickly when they don't have it. They

notice when a problem is software shaped

intuitively. Hey, I keep doing this over

and over. I wish I could see all of this

information in one place, but no one

would ever build me this software that

has phases of the moon and also when my

next homework assignment is due. Or,

it's annoying that these two systems

don't talk to each other. If you've ever

spent an afternoon building a

complicated spreadsheet to solve a

problem, I bet you have some software

vision in you. If you've ever duct taped

together automations, whether they're

N8N or Zapier or written macros or bent

a tool to do something it wasn't

designed for, that's the disposition. I

remember writing bash scripts because my

audio drivers wouldn't work back in the

early 2000s. That's softwareshaped

perspective. You don't need to know how

to code a ton or even at all now. You

need to notice when a problem could be

solved by software and curious enough to

try. The other thing I'll call out that

you need is some degree of comfort with

ambiguity. Things won't work on the

first try. You'll probably describe what

you want, get something close but not

right, and you'll need to figure out how

you refine that description. If you

require step-by-step instructions for

everything, this part might get

frustrating because you can step by step

your way into a vibe coding space, but

then it's up to you to do that sort of

parkour magic and figure out what you

want to make. And if you're okay with

that experimentation, if that iteration

is a little bit of part of the fun for

you, you'll do fine. I do want to be

honest about two big failure modes I see

with vibe coding because oftentimes

people will jump all the way over and

say there's nothing but vibe coding in

the future. I don't think that's true.

The first failure mode is moving so fast

you never stop to think. When building

is instant, which it's becoming now, the

bottleneck shifts to knowing what you

actually want. And it's very easy to

prompt before you figure that out. So

you generate piles of features that

don't fit together. You end up hip deep

in a project that doesn't serve any

clear purpose. The build test iterate

loop is so fast now it can feel really

intoxicating just for its own sake. And

you can burn a weekend building software

that doesn't really solve a real

painoint. And so the invitation here,

the discipline is to pause, to describe

what you want really plainly before you

start prompting to know why you're

building it. Even if it's just for fun

and what it should do and and what you

want it to do, what success looks like.

It doesn't have to be monetary. The

tools will happily turn vague intentions

into their idea of working code. But

that may not be your idea at the end of

the day. The second issue is confusing

works on my laptop with ready for users.

AI is compressing the cost of creating

software towards zero. And a working

prototype now takes a few minutes or

maybe a couple of hours. But AI doesn't

compress the cost of owning software in

production. Someone will still have to

answer for it. So if you wanted to make

something that was not just for you,

that actually had users as Fable now

has, then someone has to answer for when

that vibecoded project breaks at 2 a.m.

when someone's trying to order a dog

picture, right? Who carries the

liability when it fails? Who integrates

it with everything else? For personal

projects, if it's truly personal,

doesn't matter, right? You don't care.

Your greenhouse automation can crash and

the worst thing that happens is you go

water the tomato plants. Your friend

group bot can have bugs and your friends

can chuckle. The stakes are low and

imperfection is fine. But for something

that users are depending on, even for a

silly dog picture app, the gap between

prototype and production grade is still

real. Security researchers have found

that roughly 10% of apps built on some

popular vibe coding platforms have

vulnerabilities. And I would say that's

a low estimate. This is stuff like

databases exposed to the public

internet, API keys visible to anyone who

looked. AI tends to handle the happy

path and often misses the edge cases.

And this is where platforms like Lovable

are making a bet. They're running the

same playbook Shopify ran from a

strategy perspective. They're starting

with you can vibe code anything and

we'll help you grow up. That's what

Shopify did with shops. The tools are

extending that bridge toward production,

adding authentication, adding security,

scaling infrastructure, so you don't

have to start over when your little vibe

coded project takes off. The gap is

narrowing, but it's not all the way gone

yet. Right now, vibe coding is great for

prototyping. It's great for personal

tools. It's great for experiments. And

it's great to help you figure out if an

idea has legs. If something does catch

fire, you may need to level up your

understanding or you may need to bring

in someone who can help you go the rest

of the way. You might be wondering, what

is the tools stack? What makes sense

here? I'm not going to go into it in

depth. I have a whole guide for this

that I that I put on Substack that you

can grab. There's two fundamentally

different paths here. The first one is

the builder platform path, right? tools

like lovable, bolt, replet. You describe

what you want in chat and the platform

will generate the application front end,

backend, increasingly database

deployment, even domain. Lovable does

that. You never see a terminal. You

don't have to see code if you don't want

to. And this path can make sense if you

have zero technical background. You need

something fast. You know, you're

building a prototype. Your tradeoff

there is control. Those platforms

optimize for speed to first demo not for

long-term maintainability and you have

to be intentional about that. The second

path has a little bit more of a curve.

It's command line tools. Tools like

claude code, cursor, windsurf. You work

in a code editor or a terminal. The AI

writes the code. You do see it. You run

it locally and you commit to your own

repo and you deploy it when you choose.

If you have some technical comfort, this

doesn't feel scary. If you want to

understand and own what you're building

and learn, this is also a great path.

And this gives you the flexibility to

change your tools very easily without

starting over. The trade-off is

obviously the friction and the setup,

right? There is more of a learning ramp.

You need to be comfortable enough with a

command line to run basic operations.

The trade-off is that the code truly is

yours. It lives in your repo. You get to

read it. You get to modify it. And so

for someone who wants to either really

learn deeply or build for the long term,

this is often the right call. The extra

friction up front essentially pays

dividends in control and flexibility

down the one more concept for both of

these that's worth kind of keeping in

your mind. AI coding tools degrade over

conversation. The model will contradict

itself. It will forget what it built

etc. Your solution in both cases is to

break work into small tasks and run each

task as much as you can in a fresh

context window. Instead of one long

conversation that can meander, make sure

that you have clear tasking for a

particular job and you can define it

precisely. Now, if you're more complex

and you're setting up a full engineering

project, this often looks like defining

a spec and assigning multiple agents to

work on it. But in vibe coding honestly

what it often looks like is you write

out what you want to accomplish and then

it's like a very simple task in lovable

this one thing that I want to do or it's

a very clear ask to fix this particular

thing and tell me when you're done in

cloud code and you can build real stuff

right you can build a working web

application easily in a weekend at this

point you could build a client intake

form that saves responses to a database

no problem you can build an internal

tool for a small team that does

something well you build a personal

dashboard that pulls data from APIs that

you're already familiar with. These are

not at all impressive to professional

developers and they don't need to be.

These can be like very fun little

projects if you have that software

shaped mind we talked about. And yes,

you can build something more if you

want. You can build I've seen people

vibe code an entire customer

relationship management app for a small

business. Not a big business, right? not

something that's like hundreds of

people, but for a small business, it was

good enough. The skill that matters in

all this is learning how to code to

extract the most value. And this is

something that is really intuitive if

you're an engineer, but it may not be

intuitive if you've never engineered

before. Because the valuable skill isn't

really coding anymore. It's

specification. And experienced

developers know that. They know how to

break problems into pieces so that what

is coded is very very useful and

contributes to a hole. They know what

questions to ask, what happens when a

user isn't logged in, what if the

database is slow, etc. Beginners tend to

prompt more vaguely and accept whatever

the AI generates. Now, you don't need to

be a professional developer to walk

across this bridge, but you do need to

develop enough intuition to specify

clearly and evaluate with a degree of

critical thinking. It's a much smaller

gap than learning to code from scratch

and it will close faster with practice.

Essentially, you need to build an

intuition for building softwares shaped

things. Start small. Notice what goes

wrong. Develop a sense for what

questions to ask effectively if you want

to develop a vibe coding hobby. The more

small projects you work on, the faster

you tend to go. And so, if I were to

give you a few pieces of advice if you

wanted to start building, one, it really

is fun. Start with something you

actually want. That's going to give you

motivation and help you get going. Two,

describe before you build. Actually,

take the time to write it down. I talked

about that earlier in the video. Three,

accept that your early attempts, they're

going to be rough, and that's okay, and

it's part of building your intuition.

Four, just stay in the shallow end until

you're comfortable. You don't need to

jump to build something really big.

Remember, you can be playful. Five, know

when to ask for help. There's a

fantastic community of very experienced

engineers who also vibe code. They hang

out on X. They hang out in Discords.

Frankly, they hang out in my Substack

chat. You can ask them and you will get

lots of answers. I don't know where the

software creation hobby is going to go.

It's all exploding faster than we can

keep track of. Maybe it stays niche, but

the tools are going mainstream and I

built a little app for that may soon

become as common as I made you a

spreadsheet. And what I keep coming back

to is the conjunction of three things

that haven't been true before. Building

software is now inherently satisfying.

It's the feeling of making something

that just works. That has always been

true, but it used to be gated behind

years of specialized learning, and

that's not the case anymore. Two, the

internet has nearly infinite demand for

interesting things. That's been true for

a while, but finding out what the

internet had demand for was historically

very expensive. You had to invest real

time and money before you knew. And

three, the cost of building something is

approaching zero for hobby scale

software. that is really new and making

it fun is even newer. It's just a few

weeks old. The cost of experimentation

and playfulness has collapsed. If you

put all of those together, something new

emerges here. You can be playful. You

can try the idea. If it doesn't work,

you didn't lose that much time. If it

does, maybe the internet loves your dog

pictures. So, this isn't really about

hustle. This isn't really about an

arbitrage opportunity. Although you can

use these same skills for both of those

things. It's closer to what happens when

any creative tool becomes widely

accessible. Like photography, when

people have a smartphone in their

pocket, more people take cool pictures

and the things they make are more

creative and weirder and more varied

because we're just a very diverse

species. Now, some people will use this

tool and walk through the door and build

businesses and that's fantastic and the

startup use cases are real. But the

interesting story may be the people who

walk through just to make things fun.

They don't necessarily have growth

metrics. They just have the pleasure of

building their own tools and following

the ideas where they lead. The exciting

thing to me is that the tools exist now

that make that degree of playfulness

possible. And the internet truly becomes

your playground. And frankly, if that's

you, I'd love to see what you've built.