Issue #77: Welcome to the Vibe Era
Howdy 👋🏾.
Duolingo made waves this week by telling its team what Shopify already did: every decision must be AI-first. Not AI-assisted. AI-first.
They’re going all in—replacing human translators, cutting contractors, and building features powered entirely by machine learning. The backlash? Immediate. Critics say the soul of the product is fading.
But let’s be real: Duolingo isn’t wrong to feel the heat.
Translation is ground zero for AI disruption. Google is rolling out on-device, real-time translation. Smartphones are quietly becoming universal translators. When I was in Spain last year, I had full conversations with just my phone. It felt like the Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide—minus the ear slime.
So what do you do when AI starts eating your product, and your users aren’t thrilled with the taste?
There’s no easy answer. But here’s what I know: we’re entering the Vibe Era.
An era where lean teams are doing more with less, where sharp people plus smart tools beat bloated org charts. Vibe marketers. Vibe coders. Vibe ops.
-Jason
The Rise of Vibe Work: Small Teams, Big Impact
We’re officially in the vibe era, where AI supercharges output and individuals can move at the speed of entire teams. What once required a full crew now takes just smart tools and sharp instincts.
But here’s the twist: AI isn’t here to replace us, it’s here to reveal what we can do. The edge now comes from creativity, storytelling, and taste. Whether you’re building, coding, or creating, I’m breaking down how to adapt, thrive, and stay deeply human in an AI-driven world.
đź“ą Watch how AI is fueling the rise of one-person powerhouses and why this might be the era of Davids over Goliaths.
đź”— The Best in Tech This Week
🧠OpenAI stays (kind of) non-profit – Despite all the drama, OpenAI says it’s sticking with its capped-profit structure—for now. The restructuring signals they want their cake and governance, too.
🍏 Did Apple’s walled garden just crack? – A federal ruling now forces Apple to allow outbound purchase links in apps, meaning apps like Kindle can finally tell you where to buy the book. Expect a flood of “Buy Now” buttons everywhere.
🧪 Vibe Debugging Is Still the Move – Surprise: AI is still pretty bad at debugging. New research shows models struggle with fixing broken code, especially in complex testing scenarios, hitting just a 48.4% success rate even with help. Why? We haven’t trained AI on the messy, human side of debugging: intuition, decision chains, and trial-and-error reasoning. Turns out, giving a model billions of lines of code is easy. Teaching it how we think? That’s the hard part.
🎤 The AI Roadshow: Workshops, Talks & Beyond
May 8-10, 2025 – Technical.ly Builders Conference
May 19-22, 2025 – Microsoft Build
June 24, 2025 – WTCI AGILE: Building Earth’s Future From Space
🔬 Inside the Lab: What’s new at PerryLabs
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P.S. Pre-Crime, Now Loading …
Tech has a strange way of turning our worst sci-fi fears into reality. Minority Report gave us hyper-targeted ads and predictive policing—and somehow, both are now real.
The UK is building a tool to predict who’s most likely to commit murder, based on data. It’s not quite psychic precogs in a pool—but it’s uncomfortably close.
One has to ask: Are we optimizing safety, or just building better surveillance?