There are two, maybe three types of speculation: responsible, irresponsible, and degenerate gambling. I got the term "irresponsible speculation" from one of my favorite podcasts, Children of the Watch: A Star Wars Show.

Most of the show is comprised of the hosts, Alex and Mac, doing beat-by-beat breakdowns of Star Wars TV shows. It's like re-watching the show with your most knowledgeable Star Wars friends. They clue you in on obscure bits of lore that you had no idea nor interest in pursuing independently by reading books or comics, but are interesting to hear about nonetheless.

The last 20% of the podcast is generally saved for the hosts to extrapolate from the “text” of the episode they just covered, and daresay speculate irresponsibly, about what could possibly happen next in the Star Wars universe. The speculation is irresponsible because it is free of the responsibility to hold on to and defend any idea. Releasing the weight of committing to any one idea allows one to wildly think outside the box and follow rabbit trails that may or may not be there.

This is my attempt at responsibly and irresponsibly speculating on what is going to happen in 2026 and beyond because of Vibe Coding. We’re going to get a little side-tracked, but it’s going to be necessary for us to work through to redeploy our resources.

I'm no economist, but I’ll attempt to play one in this newsletter. Maybe I'll ask Claude at the end to roleplay one. You have my word that I'm writing all of my own original thoughts down first and then I’ll prompt Claude after with, “You are the world's greatest Vibe Coding economist. Predict the second and third order effects of what is going to happen because of the over the next year, 5 and 10 years due to Vibe Coding. What are events that I can bet on in Polymarket to make $1 million dollars because of these effects? Make no mistakes.”

This one's easy because we see it already. We can generate insane amounts of code for $200/month with Claude Code. Not just insane amounts, but also of insane quality (for $200 compared to a dev hourly rate) if you follow a process. See my previous newsletter for an example of this process. When I make the time, I have no doubt that I can code an entire web and mobile app end-to-end, fully tested with continuous integration and deployments. My goal is to make Roxas (git commit to social media post app) as an example of a “really real” application that I built entirely myself. If I can build off of that assumption, then basically anybody can soon enough. I'm not a coding guru. I just glue systems together as a DevOps engineer.

This means that there is now a forest of low-hanging fruit available to anyone willing to pony up a new “boutique gym” type of monthly subscription and invest in themselves. On my livestreams and in the Gas Town Discord, I encourage people, especially developers, to start treating some percentage of their personal expenses like a business, because it may soon become one.

As market-y sounding as this does (since it does come from Alex Hormozi), the person you become through experience is the ultimate investment. Who are you but a collection of your experiences at the end of your life?

To get many types of experiences (that are valuable skills!), you need to pay money. If your choice is between paying tens of thousands of dollars in traditional educational degrees, seminars, masterminds, courses, books, etc, or THE RELATIVE STEAL of just $200/month for Claude Code Max 20x, let’s not cheap out on the tool of the century that enables us to build our own versions of all the other tools.

Let me crash out further, but before I do, let me preamble this by saying everyone's situation is different. It's a hard economy out there. Layoffs are real. I get it if you can’t afford anything extra right now because times are hard and you have mouths to feed. The following does not apply to you.

By continuing to read past this paragraph in this section, I assume you have $200/month to spare that would otherwise go into drinks, sports betting, crypto, a Robinhood account, or otherwise “discretionary income”, and you're willing to listen to a pitch on the “S&ME500” (yet another Alex Hormozi thing).

On the low end, for an entry-level software developer, your average yearly salary is $100K. After taxes and deductions, it's probably more like $70,000 take home. That's $5,800/month. Rough ballparking here, Claude Code Max 20x is 3.5% of your take home pay. That's 3.5% investing directly into your future. You know of at least one person with crypto allocations bigger than that.

Re-investing into your skills as a software developer enables you to make more money through your job with promotions or through a more entrepreneurial channel. At the very minimum, you will continue to stay employed and get 3-5% yearly raises if you are actively improving your Vibe Coding. There you go, it pays for itself! Don't get me started that Vibe Coding is basically a video game and it is a pretty enjoyable thing to do as a pastime WHILE YOU ARE LEARNING AND ACTIVELY IMPROVING A VALUABLE SKILL.

That is 3.5% of your post-tax income and I’m not even using the much smaller percentage pre-tax where we normally calculate these types of things, like 15% for 401k, etc (Claude Code is 2.4% for the year in that case). If you're not willing to think about this as a reinvestment in yourself for your continued education to continue to earn the other 96.5% of your income, nor willing to stay on top of relevant tech trends (possibly THE tech trend that unlocks the rest of them), you may hit a ceiling in your career and now you don't have to wonder why.

This same crashout goes for any of the many supporting subscription services like AWS or hardware that help you become better at your profession. I just went through this anguish with buying a new personal MacBook Pro at the end of 2024, and just paid it off at the end of 2025. It turned out fine. I'm writing to you on it now.

When my old machine died, I was getting serious about posting Jiu-Jitsu content (that has since turned into, well, this). I was trying to post to Instagram every day and grow my following, but my old Mac laptop from 2016 was super slow with editing on the not-even-latest version of Final Cut Pro. It eventually didn't boot back up one day, and I had to bite the bullet on a $300/month "subscription" to a new computer for 12 months [1].

Remember how I said that there's now a forest of low-hanging fruit for anyone with $200 and some time to create an app? Everyone and their mother has the same ideas as you. If you're into Vibe Coding with agents, everyone is building their own agent orchestrator. There's dozens of them and they are going to keep coming, even though we have plenty. The other examples of these clone apps are: habit trackers, notes apps, to-do lists, or calorie trackers. We're seeing droves of these because we all spawned near the same point in this idea forest.

Literally some dude on Twitter has already launched my idea for Roxas of turning git commits into social media posts. I didn't even predict that far down the road correctly, which is what inspired this post. That’s how quickly people are moving. You can put your head down for a couple months and come out the other side with a fully baked app.

I want to try to recalibrate my predictions here because I thought I was being super sneaky with my idea but apparently other computer nerds have the same sense of putting together coding and marketing like I do to create a full stack solopreneur. I believe I was right on the idea but wrong on the timescale. I'm still going to work on Roxas for myself, just to have an example project of what I can do with Vibe Coding. I'm going to have to make some wilder and longer-term predictions for how we're all going to make money in the future.

Given how fast I was “wrong” about the timescale of Roxas, I may have to throw some darts here and move up timelines as to how quickly various people are going to adopt Vibe Coding and when we're going to see value out of it.

Knowing what people want, even if they don’t know themselves, in such a way that it helps you decide what to build, is the most valuable skill now. Figuring out what people want is THE constraint to a business now post vibe coding. It may have been to some degree before, since that's why we hire PMs to try to understand the customer and their needs, but now it's basically the only skill that matters: knowing what problem to solve. People who can Vibe Code are solvers in need of a problem.

This encourages us to not be one-dimensional. There's only so many vibe coders in need of yet another Agent Orchestrator. People can only focus their attention on one or two main ones and the rest are going to be untouched in a year. If Anthropic releases an official one, it's over.

Have hobbies. Go out and do things and meet people. You're the sum of all your experiences, remember? Go have some new and diverse ones in order to find a new perspective. If you had a great idea from your current perspective, you would be building it already. (And you might. If you are, that’s cool, I’m happy for you. I’m trying to help the others here.) Since we're all nerds, doing something new is like taking the cross product of your experience matrix with a new vector that you haven't experienced before (or something like that). You get a new resulting vector that is different and orthogonal to the original two input ones. You get what I'm saying.

Point is, anything can be coded up in an afternoon. What you decide to code up is now the most important thing. That's not to say be paralyzed in fear about coding “the wrong thing” and then end up not coding anything because of analysis paralysis. It's more like we need to take deliberate shots on goal and iterate closer and closer to what the customer wants to achieve product-market fit. We want to build the less-wrong thing over time. We need to have an ability to get our product out in front of customers and have ways to find them.

This is what I'm personally betting on. Big reveal! I've always had this thing of weirdly enjoying communicating more than the average engineer. I'm technical, but also not the engineer who likes to code and learn a new programming language on the weekends (now I do with Vibe Coding). If you're reading this, you've fallen in my trap, stay a while.

I get playing to your strengths and doubling down on what you're good at. If you're a super technical, galaxy-brain engineer, keep doing that. Just talk about it a little bit more. Trust in institutions has fallen off a cliff the last ten years, but trust in individual people, (“influencers” yuck), has never been higher. I know it's cringe to want to become a “thought leader,” but maybe it's less cringe to just be yourself and turning your thoughts into artifacts online that can be pushed out and scaled to thousands of like-minded people.

Just talking about Vibe Coding for the past six weeks has surfaced some interesting opportunities. Nothing real yet, but I'm getting more specific inbound messages than ever before. All because I'm just talking about a thing that I’m doing. It happens to be a very hot topic right now and will be for the foreseeable future, but hey, you don't get to pick what you feel called to do and wake up in the middle of the night feeling compelled to write. Strike while the iron is hot.

I'm amazed that over 50 people are subscribed to the email version of this newsletter, with maybe 3 being friends and family. There seems to be a momentum that you get when you achieve some amount of traction. You get some amount of compounding snowballing effects over time. You just have to keep going and producing “good enough” artifacts of yourself. You cannot be a perfectionist and ship nothing.

Not saying I'm even a mildly successful "thought leader" yet, but I'm much further along than I was when I started at the beginning of December 2025.

This is a 6-12 month thesis. Some small percentage of vibe coded apps are going to have a magic combination of taste, distribution, and a working product to scale at a pace that neither the app owner nor the vibe coding infra provider (Lovable, Replit, etc) that they sit on will expect. Or maybe the providers do expect it and are charging an arm and a leg margin premium on top of the AWS/GCP cloud infrastructure that they are wrapping.

This may be a good deal and even preferable to solopreneurs, but vibe coded apps with investors who look at margins are going to try to drive costs down. They know that long-term, every percentage point that they can lower on the expense side, they can either take as profit or reinvest back into the business to make it grow more.

For software engineers who are open to the idea of Vibe Coded apps, there will be a “selling pickaxes in a gold rush”-type of market opening up for consulting. And not the snarky "I'm going to clean up your slop code in six months" type of consulting, but a real "lift and shift off of Lovable and onto AWS to get our costs down and scale more” types of partnership. Hint: you get more looks at these if you talk about your skills with software engineering and vibe coding on the internet.

Another part of Vibecoder apps hitting traction is that there are now consequences to making changes that may break things. People are paying you money and they expect to get a working product at least 99% of the time. If you truly have vibe-coded your app and don't know how it works and aren't a software developer, you need to have some idea of how to become a software development shop.

You need to learn how to implement a battle-tested process that ensures the quality of your app and gives you confidence in the changes that you make. Check out how you can assess yourself with my free Day-2 readiness audit prompt here.

If you're someone technical reading this, get your practice reps in with migrating apps from Lovable, Replit, n8n, etc. and implementing software engineering best practices for them, because a wave is coming.

If you're reading this newsletter, congratulations! You're ahead of most people in terms of adopting vibe coding and AI in general as a part of your day to day workflow. Because there's so much resistance and pushback to AI “slop” code, whoever can do it the most (and therefore, the best) is going to get a fast track to increased responsibility (and compensation) to try to teach the rest of their coworkers to do the same.

Anthropic and the other AI companies don't have enough sales engineers to train all their customers on an ongoing basis to maximize the number of tokens they purchase. There have to be internal champions who take this on and translate the scant training that the model companies provide into actionable steps for their company’s internal processes for others to ramp up on.

If you're here this early AND you talk about AI at your company (writing, presenting, etc, distribution remember!), chances are you can show that you make a large impact to the company's productivity and therefore should be compensated for it. As always, no guarantees, but you can make this your job if you do it enough and are good at it.

The following are ripple effects that are probably going to happen anyway, but I have recent personal data points to extrapolate from.

This week I got asked about building a custom agent with LangChain or n8n and how to test it in a normal software development process. I embarrassingly had no idea how either agent-building technology worked.

Over the course of three hours, I built two different terminal-based LangChain RAG chat agents with Claude Code. One was a SQL agent that could query an example database with natural language. The second was a chat agent trained on a set of informational PDFs on my computer. I built both with my “plan-implement-review” Enterprise Vibe Code Method™ (jk).

It was great that they both worked right away, but what was even more magical was when I asked Claude Code, "Hey, explain how this works", Claude came back with a whole real-ass step-by-step example of how the agent:

Claude showed me real example steps in context of what the code was going to do. Now just extrapolate this out to virtually anything else.

If I had this in chemistry class, I would probably have done a lot better. I would have sat there and played with different simulated chemical reactions and gotten an intuitive sense of how certain chemicals react together. That would have been infinitely more interesting than route memorizing facts about chemicals over time to regurgitate for the test. The intuitive sense and curiosity would have propelled me to gather more knowledge about the subject, rather than being forced to just memorize a bunch of facts for the sake of learning facts and then promptly forget them the next quarter. Same thing with a MatLab or Wolfram Alpha for Math and Physics.

Education in the traditional four-year degree sense is broken. The ROI is no longer there for most people. We're going to see a lot more individual project tinkerers who go really deep in one particular niche and will accidentally make a discovery or business because they didn't know they weren't supposed to do something. Or at the very minimum, they're motivated to go back and pursue an a la carte traditional route for this hyper-specific micro-niche that they're interested in. Institutions will adopt project-based learning and the curriculum will become much more personalized to students. At least the good ones will be.

I can also see people getting a lot of surface-level knowledge and Dunning-Kruger-ing themselves into thinking they're geniuses and go down a self-congratulatory AI-induced psychosis. We're playing with fire here, but we will adapt.

Not terribly AI-related, but prediction markets going mainstream seems like an incredible conflict of interest for nearly anyone who is newsworthy. This isn't just for the highest-ranking officials, but also in the future, potentially every local election has real money riding on it to be influenced, as if there wasn’t enough already.

Polymarket's goal is to “financialize everything”. Eventually every little action someone with enough newsworthy status (lower than you think) can take will eventually have a market around it. There will be meta-financial incentives for your local mayor to approve or shut down a project, the local city council to vote for or against an ordinance, etc. just based on how much money they can make on the least likely option. We're in the worst timeline.

If you want to read the full report, click here. Basically, I’m right / it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.

I know what it's like to want to be frugal (read: cheap). You may have felt some material insecurity or personal exposure to the void / lack of safety nets in capitalism before, and you never want to feel that again. I’ve been there. Or you got red-pilled into the Reddit FIRE pipeline. It would seem like the “right” hyper-optimal FIRE-method-approved way you “should” feel about spending money on nice, useful things is BAD. But also feel free to rebel against it, it’s your one shot at this life. Why are you going to let anyone else who isn't in your life day-to-day tell you what to do? I've recently come around to this same idea about vacations, well that's a different post.

I had to get rid of the head trash around the “don’t spend money now, save for later” desire to retire early. “I’ll suffer and work hard for 15 years, and THEN enjoy my life”. Sorry bud, you're living your life right now and you're not enjoying it. We're not guaranteed tomorrow. It's easy to optimize and simply maximize a certain aspect of your life, but that's not a common experience for most people. We need to juggle piloting and reassembling this plane while it's flying.

The reality is that FIRE works for very few people with certain personality dispositions AND leave the workforce mentally and physically healthy enough to enjoy their well-earned, saved, and invested money. It's a self-selecting, self-rewarding type of thing.

It's sort of like not everyone is meant to do Jiu Jitsu even though I feel like everyone would, on paper, benefit in some way. Since money a thing that everyone has to care about, we just feel like we "should" operate a certain way because we're engineers, we like logical arguments, we like math, and we like to see optimal things go up and to the right.

You're only going to be this young once. The book "Die With Zero" by Bill Perkins has more ideas about how to spend your money optimizing for experiences rather than total dollar amount at the end of your life. TL;DR because I didn't even read the book, I just listened to him on some podcasts: take that European walking tour vacation now rather than when you’re 60 with mobility and energy issues, enjoy that nice dinner with your partner, think about giving your kids a down payment for a house when they’re 30 vs. an inheritance when they’re 60. I'm just going to extend his thinking and invest in yourself by giving yourself experiences of building stuff with relatively inexpensive tools now that can be incredibly valuable later.

I really didn't want to add another monthly payment for the laptop I ended up buying, but it was the only way I could pursue this creative project that meant a lot to me, and I felt like I needed to try it out and see it through at that point in my life. My wife encouraged me to invest in myself, since I was committed to doing all of that editing work anyways. There was no way around getting a new computer that did what I needed it to do, as fast as I needed to do it. $300/mo for 12 months was the prerequisite for me to invest in the S&ME500, and I am grateful for it.

By continuing to invest in the S&ME500, I’m already seeing traction by virtue of the fact that you're reading this, likely a complete stranger who found me yapping about Vibe Coding on the internet. Thank you.