The Free Press
Welcome back to my culture report—specifically this week, my report on tech culture, which seems to be reinventing itself by the minute. Long-simmering tech feuds are spilling out into public view: There’s Elon and Donald’s breakup, and OpenAI’s feud with The New York Times over user data and privacy. A massive software conglomerate, SAP, is being investigated for violating antitrust laws. Technology—and technologists—are crashing into the real world everywhere you look—especially in New York.
What the Hell Is Vibe Coding?
It’s Tech Week in New York, which is sort of like Fleet Week, but instead of sailors in their whites flooding the city, its software engineers, saddled with freebie backpacks from various start-ups. The series of events as a whole is put on by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, but everyone from Google to Amazon, plus bit players in the tech and business space, is throwing pancake breakfasts to discuss hardware, pizza parties with a side of product demonstrations, and happy hours for “founders and funders.” IBM did “Bytes and Bites” in the park.
These events are the sort of thing that you go to, primarily, to meet other people in your field, and where, upon RSVPing, you might be asked to provide your revenue and year-over-year growth rate (I lived it). During Tech Week, you can’t throw your shoe in Midtown without hitting five early-stage founders—which is why I’d normally avoid the whole show like the plague.
But a new term has come into the ether. There has been much chatter in recent weeks about the transformative potential of vibe coding, and as your culture columnist, I felt duty bound to learn what it meant. Where better to start than Tech Week?
The most basic definition of a vibe coder is someone who doesn’t know how to write code using traditional computing languages, like C++ or Python, but instead uses new artificial intelligence tools to write code for them.
But why? What do the vibe coders want?
Some say vibe coding, a term coined by the computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, has the power to democratize coding, allowing anyone to create their own software. It may make traditional software coders obsolete, or at least “rebalance power in Silicon Valley.” Others say vibe coding is just for fun projects—say, if you want to make a website on the weekend—not for serious work. It’s more like doodling than blueprint drafting, as a guy named Arthur, a “real coder,” put it to me while sipping champagne before a Tech Week panel was set to begin. Arthur thought that vibe coding was a potentially dangerous development, since non-coders don’t have the know-how to build secure digital products. He also said vibe coding is “the NSA’s wet dream,” whatever that means. Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO, is a vibe coder.
And the mascot for vibe coding, the enigmatic music producer Rick Rubin, might say that there is a vibe coder laying dormant inside all of us, begging to be let out. I read Rubin’s manifesto on vibe coders in preparation for meeting some.
“The Vibe Coder stays behind, that is why he’s ahead,” it reads. “He is detached, thus at one with all.” Which really clears things up. Crucially, Rubin explains, the vibe coder “allows things to come and go. His heart is open as the sky.”
I wondered if I’d meet any of these new techno monks in Midtown on Tuesday, at a gathering called “Building AI Infra Systems for Vibe Coders,” put on by the software companies Galileo, Lovable, and Convex.
“What does Convex do?” I asked a woman wearing a Convex badge who was by the elevators directing people up to the event. “Well, in short, Convex is a . . . ” she started confidently, before falling silent. “Okay. So. I don’t know what Convex is.”
Inside, there were about 50 people—mostly guys, but some women, too—milling around and munching on gratis mozzarella sticks, pesto pizza, and gluten-free pepperoni pizza. One gangly guy had a name tag that read “Sam K: Columbia, SpaceX, Climate Software Eng!” And another: “Emma (They)” and “Martin.”
I sidled up to a mustachioed software developer named Jeffrey Goldbeck, who works for an educational tech outfit. Jeff was hanging out at Tech Week because he wanted to understand “the direction AI is going.” (Pretty much every event during Tech Week has something to do with AI this year: How it works, how to use it, and, crucially, how to make money off of it.) Is Jeff a vibe coder? “No, but I’ve been to some hackathons, and I’ve seen what non-coders can do in minutes, so I’m interested in it.”
Is Sett, 27, who works at a company that builds recruiting software for real estate agents, a vibe coder? “Technically,” said Sett. “It depends how you define vibe coding.” I asked Sett how he would define vibe coding. “I don’t have a definition,” he told me.
I did meet one real-life vibe coder in the crowd. Morgan Mackenzie, 24, who is six feet, two inches and wears a size 12 shoe, quit her job at Amazon Web Services three months ago and has since built a tool called Simply Above Average, which helps tall people find clothes and footwear that fit them by sweeping the internet for brands with extended sizing. Mackenzie built her site despite having no previous coding experience or training. She told me she used Claude, ChatGPT, and Vercel to produce the code to power her site, and that she is slowly learning to embrace the term vibe coder—though she insists there’s some skill involved.
“You do need to understand something about coding to set up a back-end infrastructure that works,” Mackenzie said, “but it’s easier than it was before.”
And vibe coding could make her rich: It’s not hard to imagine a tool like Mackenzie’s getting bought up by a company like Amazon, or Bloomingdale’s, or any other e-commerce platform, and folded into its website.
What’s the catch?
Adam, 35, a motion graphic designer with salt-and-pepper hair, is willing to get real with me. Adam was just laid off from a Taiwanese virtual-reality headset company, and he’s at Tech Week to try and find a new job. (Also because of the “free pizza and drinks.”) When I asked how he’d define vibe coding, he said: “It’s when you don’t know how to code, so you use AI, and it makes all these files that look really nice, but you have no clue how it works. And it could get hacked, because there’s no security.”
“And there’s like 50 bugs you have to fix,” Adam adds.
Basically, vibe coding may get you workable blocks of code that you can configure into an app, but if you don’t understand how the code works, you won’t realize how vulnerable your creation is. If you’re coding just for fun, it’s fine; if you’re coding a website meant to serve 50 people, or five million, it’s probably not fine. Vibe coders run the risk of putting a product on the market that hasn’t been properly stress tested, exposing whoever interacts with it to malicious actors.
In fact, Lovable, one of the vibe-coding apps putting on the event I was at, has allegedly been found to have security flaws that may expose its clients’—and their clients’—private data and financial information to hackers. For instance, a vibe coder used Lovable to create a website called Linkable, which could take someone’s LinkedIn page and make them a virtual website, instantly. But because Linkable was vibe coded, its infrastructure was weak, and a hacker was reportedly able to break into its back end and get all of its users’ emails. Imagine what could happen if someone put their credit card information into a vibe-coded app with a faulty back door.
“Vibe coding is fun, but not when you get hacked and lose all your money,” said Adam.
Everyone quieted down when a young developer hopped up to the podium, eager to show off Convex’s newest vibe-coding tool, called Chef. “We have many features built in,” she told the crowd, “that I'll get into in a little bit.” Then she prompted Chef to build something akin to the Notion app, which is a digital organizer and note-taker. “You can see that Chef is cooking up a Notion clone,” she said. While Chef “cooked,” she spent a few minutes explaining various elements of the software.
“I guess you’ll have to wait for a second for the proof that Chef is good,” she said, “but it’s still working.” She pressed some buttons. Her mic kept cutting out. “It’s just hitting some type errors. Just give it a second.” The huge screen where we were all meant to watch the Chef demo kept glitching out and going black. A few people filtered out; many scrolled on their phones, mapping out their way to the next event.
I thought about how, perhaps soon, we’ll all be vibe coding—summoning the apps we want, or think might be popular, out of thin air, in seconds. Thanks to the recent leaps in the power of AI models—and the mass adoption of them—servers are overheating from all the queries. ChatGPT is breaking college. The Vibe Coding event had an electric feel, as did Tech Week as a whole. Everyone here is eager to unlock the potential of AI, and the riches that will come with it. That is, if they can get the damn thing to work.
“Okay, Chef is taking its time,” the presenter lamented. “Sometimes Chef does this.” The mic cut out again. Someone adjusted their folding chair, and it screeched against the wood floor. “The AIs are not predictable, unfortunately.” An audience member mercifully threw out a question about document databases to break the tension, but soon the room lapsed into silence again. Forlornly, the presenter said, “Okay, I’m really confused why it is still cooking.”
The Problem with ‘Mountainhead’
What will it sound like when the world ends? Will it be a bang? A boom? A scream? Or will it sound like some tech guy—after he’s unleashed a superpowerful AI upon the planet through his ubiquitous social media platform, thereby sowing confusion about what’s real and what’s not, thereby sparking an orgy of violence and ultimately civil collapse—going, “Fuuuuuck”?
That’s the working theory animating Mountainhead, a brand-new, straight-to-streaming movie directed by Jesse Armstrong, who made Succession and Peep Show. The satire, which takes place entirely within and around a luxe third home on a mountain in Utah, follows a group of four Silicon Valley frenemies who call themselves The Brewsters, and who gather for the weekend in Utah to play poker, razz each other, and revel in their estimated net worths.
That was the plan anyway, until Venis Parish, the richest of the group and the wealthiest man in the world—he is eager to make humanity a multi-planetary species and is obsessed with his baby; sound familiar?—introduces a new AI tool to the millions of users on his social media platform. In short order, the Middle East, then South America, then Europe lights up and melts down. Soon, The Brewsters are getting calls from the president, and their boards, and wondering among themselves if they should skip cocktail hour and instead just take the reins of the planet.
“Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?”
So wonders Randall, played by Steve Carell, the philosopher king of the group. He’s a venture capitalist with $63 billion, 200 IQ points, and an incurable cancer diagnosis which he refuses to accept. “Do better,” he scolds his doctor, after being informed that he only has 10 more years to live while hustling down the stairs to his private jet at the beginning of the film.
The other Brewsters include Jeff, a rising tech star who is building a content-moderation filter called Bilter. It earns him billions overnight, thanks to the gusher of misinformation that Venis let loose, yet Jeff still can’t earn the respect of his girlfriend, Hester. There’s also Souper, whose house they gather at, and who only has a meager $521 million to his name. They call him Souper, as in soup kitchen, because he’s the poorest of the group.
The Mountainhead script is laced with techspeak—“bootstrap to a corporate monarchy”; “cyber-state it to the singularity”; “eat the chaos”—and endless cringey abbreviations like “thou,” as in, “The house is 1-thou square feet.” We hear “mil,” “bil,” and “prez.” They debate whether to let their inventions run wild (never mind the casualties, Venis “just wants to get us transhuman!”). And Armstrong pokes fun at the way tech types take a utilitarian approach to everything in life: Since his first bout with cancer, Randall reports to his friends, “Wisdom: 50 percent increase. Purpose, meaning: both way up.” Mulling whether to commit murder, one of The Brewsters wonders, “Should we run a model?”
“The Republican guard are pissed,” announces Venis about halfway through the movie, looking out at the mountainous vista from the living room in the ski house. “I’d feel happier away from all the glass.” Souper agrees. “We don’t want any shrapnel getting in the sliders,” he says. “Let’s hunker in the bunker!”
That’s when things go from semi-realistic to totally absurd. Although, after this week, with the Donald Trump-Elon Musk feud escalating on X—to the point where Trump is threatening to pull SpaceX contracts and Elon is threatening to decommission important spacecrafts—maybe this film is more realistic than originally intended.
But in Mountainhead, as in Succession, there’s something beneath all the hardballing and the jargon, the insane wealth and the prescient political arm wrestling—and that is the hole that each and every character is trying to fill. Jeff wants to be loved, by his friends and his partner. Souper wants respect, and thinks money is the best way to get it. Venis wants to be a hero, or at least to be the first to plant his flag on the new world. And Randall just doesn’t want to die.
In Mountainhead, Armstrong isn’t sure whether to be terrified of technocrats, or to make fun of them and the fact that, while they may have visions of world domination, they don’t even know how to boil an egg. The dialogue goes in circles—and Jeff, the conscience of the movie, sounds like a broken record a lot of the time: “Have you guys seen what’s happening in Uruguay? Egypt? Uzbekistan?” Still, the competition, ego, and insecurity that courses through The Brewsters is fun, if painful, to watch. These men might fancy themselves Gods, but they’re just guys, who, despite having everything, can’t seem to get what they want.
Here’s What Else I’m Thinking About:
Broadway is still reeling from a battle between grande dame diva Patti LuPone, and two other musical theater stars, who are both black. It all started with the publication of a LuPone profile in The New Yorker which is replete with acidic quotes. When asked about Audra McDonald’s turn as Mama Rose in Gypsy, a role for which LuPone won a Tony, she reportedly stared out the window for 15 seconds before responding, “What a beautiful day.” On Kecia Lewis, LuPone had this to say: “She calls herself a veteran? Let’s find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.” Then: “She’s done seven. I’ve done 31.” (Although The New Yorker’s fact-checkers say, “The correct numbers are actually 10 and 28, but who’s counting?”) What followed was an open letter signed by over 500 actors trying to get LuPone banned from the Tonys, a CBS interview with McDonald, the recirculation of one of Lewis’s old Instagram Stories, and finally, an apology from Patti. The whole balagan is the best show on Broadway since Cats.
In other grudge news: Five years after she first claimed to have been denied the opportunity to buy her own masters, Taylor Swift finally owns the original versions of her first six studio albums. She reportedly spent $360 million buying her own life’s work. “To say this is my biggest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” Swift wrote in a letter to fans posted on her site. The feud is almost too juicy to give up. A brave, vulnerable songstress going up against the evil corporate dragons to get back what she says is hers: It’s a fairy tale. Expect a new, headline-grabbing Swift grudge to emerge in the next six months. My bet? A friendship breakup album about Blake Lively.
Monumentally large paintings have been in vogue for a while. They photograph well, they’re impressive to look at, and even more impressive to own—and auction houses can charge a lot for a mural-sized piece. Even I, with my scrappy art budget, opted for a painting that was so big that the canvas had to be restretched onto a frame inside my apartment. (If anyone is in the market for a two-times-bigger-than-life-size portrait of a horse jockey, contact me!) But the new thing is teeny-tiny works: Anna Weyant just showed a series of small square paintings of jewelry boxes holding pearl earrings or a bracelet, painted to scale at the Park Avenue Armory. And this week, a “Small Format Painting” show opened at the downtown gallery 56 Henry. Big artists are thinking small—and that’s a good thing: We’ll be able to see more than one painting at a time!
In other art news, the White House unveiled a new presidential portrait of Trump, a photograph taken by Daniel Torok. It’s intense, in your face, and dramatically lit. Which I think is an accurate representation of 47’s presidency.
Hollywood is dead. Actors, directors, designers, and cinematographers—everyone it takes to make a movie, except for maybe craft services—are all saying there’s just no work to be had in Los Angeles, and that even movies set there are being filmed in other states with better economics—or overseas. And then: Disney laid off hundreds across its film and TV divisions. Certainly the traditional movie business had been dying for a while. The big question is: Who will step into the void?
For more of Suzy’s culture takes, read her piece on male friendship:
