SWL Week in Review - Vibecode Reality, OF, and Incumbents
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)
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email sl@wlessin.com
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