The use of as many AI tokens as possible, as fast as possible. Enabled by agentic coding tools that spawn subagents running unsupervised. Writing an essay uses around 10,000 tokens. Tokenmaxxers blow through billions a week, burning the planet along the way. Fat token budgets have become a job perk, and some rack up monthly...
Tags vibecoding (19)
Build interactive widgets for articles with AI. If it breaks in a week, no one cares. If it draws an audience, you invest. A Norwegian group of local papers turned that into policy. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
Muscle memory for agents: The Printing Press. An agent-native CLI for any API, app, or site from a single prompt. The library already has 170-plus CLIs across travel, CRM, media, and more.
A Wall Street Journal SEO editor vibe coded a real-time stock trend tracker for his newsroom to find gaps in their coverage. It weighs 15+ data sources, covers 350+ tickers, and went from idea to rollout in a few weeks. The pitch: let journalists build their own tools. (Will Flannigan, LinkedIn)
David Pierce welcomes “the era of personal software.” He built his own productivity app and spent weeks fighting with tool after tool. On a closer look, it’s just dashboard stitching together Raindrop, Todoist, Obsidian, and Google Calendar. (The Verge)
Paul Ford can explain coding and vibecoding, and in this podcast episode, he does both, with a healthy dose of “Man, nobody knows.” (Channels, Peter Kafka)
Vibecoding puts health records and customer data out in the open: A security researcher found hundreds of websites were leaking data through a commonly used service called Supabase (which blamed its new type of user.) (Eva Wolfangel, Die Zeit)
Vibecoding a data visualization dashboard for a Philippine health survey turned out to be “AI does the boring parts while you have to make a lot of editorial calls.” Jaemark Tordecilla covers the wins (data cleaning, pivoting fast, chart generation) and the walls he hit. (Generative AI in the Newsroom)
The first white-collar job that AI can actually replace is the one that built the AI. Now coding is conversational. One dev is pleading with his chatbot: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.” (Clive Thompson, New York Times)
34 projects, 24 contributors, 65 minutes: Hacks/Hackers held a vibe coding show & tell, and journalists shipped fact-checkers, salary surveys, power grid monitors, and a Discord clone.
A young reader got so frustrated with the FT’s news product that she built her own using Claude Code. She’s paying for a subscription, she wants personalized news, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it. (Jodie Hopperton, INMA)
The vibe is Palantir cosplay: World Monitor by Elie Habib is a real-time “situational awareness” dashboard with threat feeds, geopolitical maps, and a three-stage AI classification pipeline. He calls it a “weekend hack.”
You can just build things
My website was put together with a text editor and a "better done than perfect" attitude. I added new things here and there. Fiddled around. Over time, it got messy. And I never built a dark mode, because I feared the time it would take to rebuild everything. But you're looking at a much improved...
Paul Ford (who wrote a legendary 38,000-word piece on “What Is Code”) on his new obsession with vibe coding: He’s building apps on the subway that he’d once have billed clients $350,000 for. “It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too.” (New York Times)
Vibe coding starter guide for newsrooms (Joe Amditis, Center for Cooperative Media)
Make this your weekend read: Designer Frank Chimero talks about AI and specifically vibe coding. “Time saved is not strength gained,” he says, and gets into how Brian Eno works with machines for his music. And then there is a nice riff on the Ghibli movie “Spirited Away”. Recommended!
