Apparently, in Silicon Valley right now, people have quit drinking because they're too busy managing swarms of AI agents and want to stay sharp.
"I'm gonna split – got to get back to my agents."
"No worries dude, I'm actually managing mine from the phone right here."
They're working with their AI agents until they can't keep their eyes open. Waking up just to check what got built while they slept.
They're moving everything they can from the someday/maybe list to the built list as fast as possible.
Building 100x more than ever before, 24/7.
And ... none of it seems to be going anywhere.
The cost of software development has collapsed. Brilliant. Except the bottleneck was never really building. It was distribution. It was whether anyone wanted the damn thing. It was whether the thing filled an intolerable gap in a situation that someone had to deal with. And it was whether the someone could find the thing when the gap became intolerable.
"If we build it, they will come."
Mmm. They didn't though, did they?
"Yeah but what if we build 100x more, though??"
True, there's always an infinitesimal chance that you will luck onto building a thing that does fill an intolerable gap. As long as that thing is coherent. Which is unlikely, if an AI agent made it.
This aspect of the vibe coding revolution looks eerily like a gambling addiction. Keep yanking on the agentic slot machine and hope that it eventually spits out three cherries. Then keep yanking.
But vibe coding didn't create this addiction, it turbo charged what was already there.
Founders orchestrating ever more complex agent swarms to deliver more features ... instead of talking to customers. Consultants polishing methodologies that their bag of words tells them will change the world ... instead of making calls. Execs refining strategy decks that their text extruder calls visionary ... instead of having the conversation with that person who needs to hear something difficult.
Supply-side tinkering has always been a displacement activity to avoid confronting uncertainty. What's changed is that you can now avoid confronting it more completely while feeling more fake-productive than ever.
Tom & Corissa x
Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe for more.
