In this issue: From capturing crawler bots to putting traffic cones on robotaxis—meet the new Luddites leading the resistance. Meanwhile, the article is dying, replaced by liquid experiences that adapt to you. David Bauer from Republik on building an AI culture of curiosity over fear. Plus: The magic tokens that unlock better prompts and why vibecoding’s honeymoon phase is over.
The New ABC of AI: I’m building a glossary of terms that actually matter—forget LLMs, think fakecast, deep tailoring, and Luddites. Five examples below, full collection on my website. Got additions? Send them my way.
Luddites: The Rebellion against the Empire of AI. Named after a British labor movement from 1811-1816 that—with style and swagger—disrupted textile factories. Not opposed to machines per se, they wanted a say in how technology was used to preserve their livelihood, their craft, their community. (The government eventually suppressed the Luddites, requiring 14,000 troops.) The Luddites of today ask who actually gains from AI and why we would want to substitute creativity and excellence with exploitation and slop. The new Luddites are out there, capturing crawler bots, putting traffic cones on robotaxis, building the resistance. Take it from Nemik, a fictional character in the series “Andor”: “The Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.” See: Merchant, Brian (2023): Blood in the Machine
Make prompt engineering great again: A growing list of tools may help you improve your generative AI prompts, but sometimes all you need is a spreadsheet. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Magic tokens: Adding “think step by step” in prompts can yields better outputs. Anthropic says that giving the chatbot a role like “data scientist” makes for different results, because a data scientist might see different things in data. Now, models are not using language, but a numerical representation: tokens. 17509, 656, 5983 is “step by step” tokenized for ChatGPT 4o. Magic tokens! But if you tell a model not to think of pink elephants, you might dilute focus and waste context. Beware of “poison tokens.” See: Brownlee, Jason (2025): Magical Tokens for LLMs
Quick plug: My friend David Bauer just published his AI toolkit—how he uses it for work, life, and play, complete with copy-paste prompts. It’s gold. His newsletter’s worth a subscribe too. Actually, I just invited him to be this week’s guest. Take it away, David!
Three Questions with David Bauer
David Bauer leads product development and AI initiatives at Republik in Zurich, Switzerland.
What's the most important question right now?
How do we use AI to be better, not just more efficient?
Rushing to implement the most obvious features and viewing AI primarily as a cost-cutting opportunity will only weaken media organisations in the ongoing struggle with big platforms. Just one, particularly ironic example: While media organisations are using large language models to more efficiently optimise their content for search, Google is busy implementing AI Overviews to send ever fewer people to news sites.
In recent years, news organisations have become much better at putting users and their needs at the centre of what they do. Let’s not backtrack and rigorously focus on applying AI where it serves our audiences – and thus strengthens our mission and business model.
That requires strategic leadership, but most importantly: a culture of curiosity and experimentation instead of fetishising or demonising AI.
What do you wish you'd known a year ago?
How much of a game changer Cursor is for people who like to code but aren’t great at it (👋). I started using it a couple of weeks ago, and it has made all the difference: Lots of ideas for little web apps that would have stayed somewhere at the back of my head are now out there on the web with a couple hours’ work.
What future are you looking forward to?
A future imagined by optimists, built by realists, and scrutinised by journalists. (Oh, and emissions-free, and run by women, for a change.)
Vibecoding: Not coding, but telling a chatbot what an app should do. It throws an error? Ask AI to fix it. Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe code” in early February 2025: “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” By month’s end, the New York Times had covered it. Backlash followed: vibecoded apps exposed user data and API keys. What about security, compliance, best practices, testing, maintainability?, the old guard asks. AI-assisted coding lives on, but the vibes are off. (A better term might be “situated software.“)
Overemployment: When you secretly balance more than one remote job simultaneously. This trend started in software development during the Covid years—a mixture of hustle culture and strategic deadline management. Bosses are not happy. Those AI efficiency gains? Not for the plebs.
