SWL Week in Review - Vibecode Reality, OF, and Incumbents

From:

Sam Lessin <sam@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

5/23/2025, 9:57 PM

More or Less - Is Everyone Lying about Vibe-coding? and Special Guest Fidji
The ladies were out which makes for a weird more or less… but we had a ‘special guest’ named Fidji join (watch for the joke). Dave and I spent the vast majority of time talking about the realities / tools of vibe coding and where we are really at … upshot, it is still basically web development and most people lauding where we are are either lying OR blind to their own optimism. Lots of discussion around models and trust, etc. and a sprinkling of what happens when big companies like google launch ‘all the things’

Hot Takes:

Bid on Onlyfans with Me— The Ultimate AI Short Strategy This is looking like the moment… and I have been on this for years… I just need to find the right capital partners. Thesis is clear — prints money, the 101 crowd of tech people are either too patrician OR / even better, they think AI is gonna kill it, so it is cheap … but this is totally wrong - best creator platform in the world, massively profitable, obvious upside, and killer position for AI with human in the loop (AI leverage on messaging profits, etc.) + real creators as brands.

Bitcoin $111,000 — look, my concern has been historically that it was great, but basically the risk-on tail of risk-on assets based on how it was held / thought of… but now it seems to be legitimately doing its job / serving exactly the purpose people thought it would when people were going crazy about it in 2009/10…. I am sure more twists and turns, but it is really the ultimate meme-value-story among meme-value-stores…

Lonsdale Interview — Joe and I had a serious podcast / less than my average snark and more intellectual — I really enjoyed it, and I think others did as well — big themes around Harvard, merit, etc…

Lessons from In-Flight ‘Vibe Coding’ — Have I mentioned Incumbents are Gonna Win? — since Sunday I spent 26 hours in the air this week…. The vast marjory of them ‘vibe coding’… which really is the prefect in-flight activity. Tons of fun, and with easily 20 hours on a keyboard banging on all the tools, I feel like I have a much better sense of what is what… Impressed with what Cloudflare and Digital Ocean are doing… it turns out that Gemini really is way better at code tasks than 4o … and I am pretty underwhelmed with cursor. Biggest takeaway — Github is gonna win — managing state on applications / what is actually live, etc. is probably the hardest problem, and it very much biases towards incumbents / where the code is deployed…. Also, I can’t believe in 2025 we are still dealing with async jobs & queuing crapola.

Solana Accelerate Conference & JMJin NYC — it was fun to do a talk with Iqram on the main stage after Raj and Toli — finally got to one of these because they finally decided to host it in the US and not some weird asian country :) — Also met the whale holder of Jelly my Jelly coin, a 19 year old student that has several million dollars of the token…. Love to see it.

Rosta dot fun…. HT Jake Nyquist for taking my RFP product rant and delivering sometime great on it — this is a wonderful demonstration of needed product in the crypto world that is obvious but just hasn’t been well executed — working on this and more… but if you need to verifiably and simply hold a vote weighted by solana token holdings, Rosta got you.

Methaphone — This story continues to tickle me pink …. Eric wrote up his TLDR on where things are… but there really is a moment here when something like this gets 150 million impressions on social, people in Europe weirdly know what it is and are excited to see it… etc.

Autobahn-ing in a ‘Ford Kuga’, like a real American — I tried to rent a Porsche…. But I think the brand new Ford Kuga was in some ways more fitting…. I tried really hard, but it just wouldn’t go much over 165 KPH.

Harvard & DHS Face-off — ok this is getting a bit absurd re: government over-reach… I won’t go into it here, there is just too much nuance… but in 1636 Allison did a really really great deep dive on what is actually happening here and the stakes / plays. The government is 1000% overreaching, but that doesn’t mean that it is OK for other factions to politicize Harvard for the sake of ‘the resistance’ — Harvard leadership needs to stay focused on regaining academic mission and reform, and it would be a disaster for this salvo in the ‘everything results in the opposite of intended’ sense to be captured by the far left as a tool of resistance (which sadly I think there is a real risk of)

Email outbound is already dead — hearing this from a lot of folks.. that email effectiveness is dropping — maybe I will have to turn this into a weekly conference call…

Bullet Time and The Insta360 5th Gen — really, the Insta360 is a great camera— and messing around with it, thinking back to watching the DVD extras on the Matrix … it is pretty cool that a camera style from 20 years ago that took millions to pull off now costs $500 bucks.

AI and Scams are Getting Scary — last summer I got caught in a very very scary scam (and will be forever grateful to google leadership for saving my ass) — but with AI I am now every once in a while getting a really believable email from docusign, google, coinbase, etc. and it makes me want to air gap things.

Sam

P.S. I am not really a collector of much — but in honor of Harvard’s original Magna Carta (how cool) — I do sort of collect old / rare maps with interesting views of the world? Where do I get them… well I love geographicus.com — but don’t bid up my maps bro.

P.P.S anyone want an e-cane (what Ive should be making)

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