The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - All the Cool Things People are Vibe Coding

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, all the interesting ways that people are vibe coding now, and appropriately on the headlines, a vibe coding firm is the newest AI unicorn. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, happy Friday, quick announcements. Thank you to the sponsor of today's show, Blitzy, plum, and Superintelligent. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.

Starting point is 00:00:37 In a surprise to no one who is a regularly vibe coding, Loveable has become the latest AI unicorn. The company raised a $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation. Now, this is a company that has seen immense growth, 2.3 million active users, 180,000 paying customers, and growth from 17 million ARR in February

Starting point is 00:00:57 to 75 million ARR today. Now, Loveable achieved this growth while numbering just 45 full-time employees, demonstrating just how much tiny AI-native teams can punch above their weight class. When it comes to what they're thinking about next, it seems like the big goal is to make the jump from casual projects and prototyping to being able to generate full production-ready code that can underpin a full business. CEO Antoine Ocica said,

Starting point is 00:01:20 Every day, brilliant founders and operators with game-changing ideas hit the same wall. They don't have a developer to realize their vision quickly and easily. Now, it appears as though lovable is getting closer to this idea of being able to support fully fledged businesses. At the beginning of the month, Antoine tweeted, I'm officially an angel investor in a software startup built with Lovable. The team is cracked and the product is impressive. They're going to go far. He also recently talked about a lovable built app that made $3 million in 48 hours. Antoine writes, the team behind it was already the largest ed tech company in Brazil with 500,000 paying users. They used Lovable to build a premium version of their education

Starting point is 00:01:55 platform in two weeks. We're going to talk a lot more in the main episode about all the different ways people are using vibe coding tools and the expanded aperture of what they're actually doing with them. Next up, Hot Deal summer continues with Perplexity apparently raising an extension of their Series E round at a fresh $18 billion valuation. Sources said the deal would bring in another $100 million to add to the half billion already raised in May. You could kind of chart AI's continued rise based on Perplexity's funding rounds.

Starting point is 00:02:24 They entered 2024 valued at around a half billion dollars, but added multiples across three funding rounds that year. This year they've continued to jump, which is a reflection, I think, of both their relentless push to release new features, such as their Comet browser, as well as the scarcity of cap table space at the leading AI companies. Now, speaking of Comet and web browsers, Perplexity CEO Ravon Shrinivas had some interesting comments about competing with Google and a Reddit AMA about comment that came earlier this week.

Starting point is 00:02:51 He lauded them for keeping Chromium open source and also talked about how, yes, they had with their Project Mariner, some features that were similar to Comet. He said he expected them to pay close attention and to copy and adopt stuff. However, he pointed out that they face in a way that perplexity doesn't an innovator's dilemma. He writes, Google is a giant bureaucratic organization with too many decision makers and disjointed teams. And they have business model constraints on letting agents do the clicks and work for you while continuing to charge advertisers enormous money to keep bidding for clicks and conversions.

Starting point is 00:03:22 At some point, they need to embrace one path and suffer in order to come out stronger, rather than hedging and playing both ways. And while of course, Arvin has an agenda in saying this, it is true that one of the structural advantages that startups have over-incumbents in this AI battle is that they are not constrained by legacy business models. Now, so far, frankly, I think Google has done a pretty good job of threading this line, but the fact that they have to thread the line is a challenge in and of itself. Next up, we move over to another big theme of the summer, which is the AI Talent Wars. Zuck is apparently not done hollowing out Apple's foundation model team, as Bloomberg

Starting point is 00:03:58 Mark German reports that Markley and Tom Gunter have joined to work under their old boss, Rooming Pang, at Meta's new superintelligence group. German mentioned that Apple is now offering pay increases to around 100 engineers as a retention incentive while they figure out their restructuring and acquisition plans, but he also noted that the retention monies fall far short of competing with Meta's offers. In fact, sources say that Gunter received one of those fabled $100 million packages. Now, as the market gets increasingly convinced that Apple is going to have to acquire their way out of this problem. One of the targets that has recently been reported is Mistral. Now, Mistral is one of the only startups left from the

Starting point is 00:04:35 2023 era that is still working to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic in consumer-facing chatbots. And in the latest version of their LaChat product, they've added a deep research mode, voice model, native multilingual reasoning, and image generation. And while on the one hand, those are just keeping pace and feature parity with tools, Mistrel is clearly trying to carve out some separate space. First of all, it's one of the only companies left that's actively still pushing open models, which could be even more true as meta is rumored to be pivoting away from open source, but also they've strategically positioned themselves as a European giant. In fact, with this release, they're saying that they're the only company that's able to offer

Starting point is 00:05:11 a high-performance chatbot that actually complies with European laws. I don't know ultimately if that's enough to continue to compete, but in a world of giants, they continue to hold their own. Lastly, today, some scuttlebutt around Claude code, users of the tool are complaining of unexpected usage limits. The platform's GitHub page has been flooded with bug reports as users try to figure out why they've been cut off. They're being told Claude Usage Limit reached and given a reset time but no explicit announcement of a change in limits. One user wrote, Your tracking of usage limits has changed and is no longer accurate. There is no way in the 30 minutes of a few requests I've hit the 900 messages. An anthropic representative said that they were aware of the

Starting point is 00:05:50 issue and working to resolve it, but didn't speak to any policy changes. Now, the change demonstrates how critical AI coding has become from any developers. One user told TechCrunch, it just stopped the ability to make progress. I tried Gemini and Kimmy, but there's really nothing else that's competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now. Issues seem concentrated on heavy users who have paid up for access to the premium $200 a month max plan. Anthropics pricing system has tiered limits that are supposed to be 20 times higher than the pro plan, but the company has never guaranteed a certain level of access. Many users were never even aware there were usage limits associated with the Max Plan until this week. Frankly, Cloud Code might be a

Starting point is 00:06:26 victim of its own success. Anthropic has reported 300% growth in the products user base over the past two months. Adam Wolfe, who manages the CloudCode team, told Venture Beat, we've seen five and a half times revenue growth since we launched the Cloud4 models in May. That gives you a sense of the delusion demand we're seeing. And however that gets resolved, I think that this challenge between cost and usage is going to do nothing but continue as AI-powered coding becomes more and more normalized. Speaking of which, that is the subject of our main episode, and now it is time to close the headlines and jump to that. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy. Now, I talk to a lot of technical and business leaders who are eager to implement cutting-edge

Starting point is 00:07:04 AI, but instead of building competitive modes, their best engineers are stuck modernizing ancient codebases or updating frameworks just to keep the lights on. These projects like migrating Java to Java 21 often means staffing a team for a year or more. And sure, co-pilots help, but we all know they hit context limits fast, especially on large legacy systems. Blitzy flips the script. Instead of engineers doing 80% of the work, Blitzie's autonomous platform handles the heavy lifting, processing millions of lines of code and making 80% of the required changes automatically. One major financial firm used Blitzy to modernize a 20 million line Java code base in just three and a half months, cutting 30,000 engineering hours and accelerating their entire roadmap.

Starting point is 00:07:44 email jack at blitzie.com with modernize in the subject line for prioritized onboarding. Visit blitzie.com today before your competitors do. Today's episode is brought to you by Plum. You put in the hours, testing the prompts, refining JSON, and wrangling nodes on the canvas. Now it's time to get paid for it. Plum is the only platform designed for technical creators who want to productize their AI workflows. With Plum, you can build, share, and monetize your flows without giving away your prompts

Starting point is 00:08:13 or configuration. When you're ready to make improvements, you can push updates to your subscribers with a single click. Launch your first paid workflow at useplum.com. That's Plum with a B and start scaling your impact. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligence, specifically Agent Readiness Audits. Everyone is trying to figure out what agent use cases are going to be most impactful for their business, and the Agent Readiness Audit is the fastest and best way to do that. We use voice agents to interview your leadership and team, and process all of that information

Starting point is 00:08:45 to provide an agent readiness score, a set of insights around that score, and a set of highly actionable recommendations on both organizational gaps and high-value agent use cases that you should pursue. Once you've figured out the right use cases, you can use our marketplace to find the right vendors and partners, and what it all adds up to is a faster, better agent strategy. Check it out at besupor.a.i or email agents at besupor.aI to learn more. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are once again talking about vibe coding, one of the most important phenomena of 2025,

Starting point is 00:09:19 certainly an early contender for AI term of the year 2025. And we're going to talk about a bunch of different aspects of vibe coding today, including what some people are using it for, which is getting way more diverse, but we're going to start with a new study from the information that was trying to dig into not only what tools were people using, but also how effective they were finding them. Now, this is not some big, comprehensive professional study. It is the information subscriber survey. Given that, it's going to be a highly enfranchised tech-oriented audience. So that is, of course, going to color some of these answers. I would not expect the numbers to be the same if you

Starting point is 00:09:55 asked a general panel of American adults, for example. So the core question at the study, which is very simple, but also a really important one, is are you satisfied with your vibe coding experience. Now, this matters because a lot of the discourse around vibe coding is naturally about its limitations. It's quite obviously powerful to have AI that can code. But we're also trying to figure out how that's going to interact with other types of human expertise, what sort of systems you have to build around vibe coding to actually get things to production, startups are trying to figure out what gaps in the user experience there are. And so the simple question I actually think is very valuable. And the short answer is that people are having a great experience with this.

Starting point is 00:10:37 10% said that they weren't so satisfied, and 2% said that they weren't satisfied at all. But 53% said that they were somewhat satisfied, and 35% said that they were extremely satisfied. Now, even in a heavy tech cohort, that means that in total 88% of those who were vibe coding said that they were satisfied with the results, at least somewhat. That's remarkable. What's more, a huge preponderance of the respondents were vibe coding. 75% of subscribers were using these tools. Now again, yes, this is a tech audience, but still 75% penetration of a thing that didn't exist at the beginning of the year, at least not really, is enormous.

Starting point is 00:11:19 What's more, if the fact that this is a tech audience maybe makes the 75% penetration number a little bit less impressive, one could argue that it makes the 88% satisfaction. satisfaction number more impressive. In the sense that if you gave an average person who didn't really interact with technology very much, or at least didn't interact with it professionally, these tools, they're going to seem at first glance much more impressive than it would to people who have much more experience with coding specifically in technology in general. So the fact that you have this incredibly high satisfaction rate is really telling and very bullish for these tools. It also suggests, I think, not surprisingly, that we are in the midst

Starting point is 00:11:56 of a permanent shift in how code is written. These are not the numbers that you get around a passing fad. And so with that in mind, I think it's interesting to ask, what are people actually vibe coding? You might remember back at the beginning, there were a couple of high-profile games from people like Peter Levels that got folks really excited. But what are some of the other use cases out there?

Starting point is 00:12:16 I think a great way to understand how a technology is evolving is to see how the use cases are evolving. Now, I've talked about how our team at Super is already soft-banned from making feature requests. Instead, everyone has to vibe code prototypes, think through the details, and use the actual output to communicate what they're thinking about more fully. But that use case has been firmly established for months, and it doesn't really take advantage of model improvements.

Starting point is 00:12:38 What I mean is that it doesn't matter if a prototype is buggy, it's just throw away code that's meant to communicate an idea. And indeed, what we're seeing now is absolutely a move from that sort of prototyping use case to actually using production applications that are both public-facing but also to just internal facing and meant to help you improve your work. John Park Hill, the director of machine learning at Teret Therapeutics, showed off a custom-built front end for his data. To give you a sense if you were not watching, it looks like a catalog of different drug molecules and a widget for checking how they react. Hill wrote, The craziest thing about vibe coding is that you now

Starting point is 00:13:15 sometimes make a UI just to make sure you're underlying data abstractions are working right. Presently, I'm writing a fully expressive logical enumeration engine I need to make an ML dataset. So, Now, again, just to double click on this point, this is the type of thing that a year ago, if John had coding skills, he would have had to spend a serious amount of time away from his main work doing or go hire a team of freelance developers for a couple of thousand bucks, and after a bunch of back and forth he might have had something functional after a week or two, now something like this can be done in a couple of afternoons. And what's important about this particular example, I think, is that it demonstrates that

Starting point is 00:13:50 a whole new world of custom software is opening up. There are likely no more than a couple of hundred or maybe at most a couple of thousand people that would need this sort of application spun up, meaning there's just not the incentive there for it to become commercial software. But now it could exist for very little money and basically on demand. Joe Butler, a staff member at OpenAI, shared another example. You remember that week off that OpenAI gave to try to get their people all chilled out a little bit? Well, Joe writes, OpenAI gave me a week off, so naturally I vibe coded and shipped a new app. The tweet thread continues, here's how I accidentally built a production-grade app from scratch in less than 10

Starting point is 00:14:25 days using almost entirely new tools and some AI magic. Now, he went on to describe a simple tool that enhances photos for Airbnb hosts, a pain point he was experiencing at the time. Now, this came out of a real experience. Joe writes, updating my Airbnb listing photos made me realize a painful truth. My photography skills are terrible. Could AI make them look pro? Turns out yes, but it needed careful prompting to avoid that fake AI look. Challenge accepted. Now, by way of background, Joe writes that the last production app he built was back in 2018, and the stack back then was, in his words, a janky combo of angular front end and PHP back end. This time around, Joe's stack included the GPT Image 1 API, V0 by Verself for design, windsurf, and OpenAI's Codex tool.

Starting point is 00:15:13 The net of it was this. 10 days, 60 PR merges later, I had a fully functional app built entirely with tech I'd never touched before. Who knew vibe coding wasn't just a meme? By the way, if you want to check it out, go to turtledit.com, T-U-R-T-L-E-D-I-T-T-I-T-T-I-T-C. I think what Joe's story shows is how much vibe-coding unlocks entrepreneurial creativity. This is a highly speculative product that started with a solution that someone needed for themselves, and not only with the economics of building it for yourself, probably not have made sense, certainly if you were thinking about doing something public. The risk is that you have to put down thousands of dollars to hire a dev team or take that time yourself to build an MVP before you know if you have demand.

Starting point is 00:15:53 Now you can just push the code. Now, one of the common critiques of vibe coding has been that it's only for that use case that I mentioned before of prototyping. But Marty Markinson points out that prototyping goes a lot farther when it comes to trying out new ideas. Marty writes, vibe coding isn't for the final product. It's for validating products in days, not months. Instead of wasting time building production software that never gets used, you can have an idea

Starting point is 00:16:18 build it in hours and share with friends for feedback. If it takes off, you're going to need to build again from scratch. But increasingly, I'm not sure even that's true. And I certainly don't know that I think it's going to be true for long. Lanny Richitsky of Lenny's podcast and Lenny's newsletter, who I'm sure many of you follow. Just about a week ago posted, on LinkedIn X and in my newsletter Slack, I asked you, what's a product or tool you vibe coded that you actually use regularly in your work and life? The response was overwhelming. I got over 1,000 enthusiastic reports. applies, ranging from a buzzer app that automatically answers apartment deliveries, to a hyper-personalized greeting card generator, to a workplace accomplishments tracker, to a daily newsletter that can help you

Starting point is 00:16:58 learn a new language. Now, Lenny shared 50 of his favorite examples, and frankly, these don't feel to me like just throw away random apps. Morgan Brown built a carb counter, saying, I built carb scan to help manage my son's diabetes and blood glucose levels with faster carb counting. I used Replit, has become a daily go-to. Vajith Quadros made an app that was simply about how many layers should I wear today. Makes me think that he has to be in San Francisco because that's a question that you really do have to ask every single day. What's interesting about this one is that clearly other people wanted as well. He said, I vibe-coded this with lovable and use it myself every single day. It's grown to 85,000 users in total. Now, of course, you could say, couldn't you just use a weather app

Starting point is 00:17:37 for this? Vigit's argument was that they had too much clutter when this is all he really cared about when it came to the weather. There were tons of these sort of personal design for me types of micro apps. Sue used Bolt to build an app called Flowbound that gives them exercises or games to do when they find themselves procrastinating on something. It helps them monitor whether they are overwhelmed, confused, hopeless, anxious, distracted, disorganized, etc. There was also a pickleball games tracker, a nicotine pouch tracker, tons of parenting and family apps. There's this one very cool one that creates stories by dragging emojis into a pot. It's called story pot and you literally take a bunch of emojis, put them into a little image of a pot and it cooks up a story based on that. And these really

Starting point is 00:18:21 run the gamut from small personal apps to things that people have pushed into full production. Ben Ogren built a chores app for their kids called Chores AI that's now available in the app store. And of course, there is a ton of work productivity. Meeting prep automation using a Zapier agent, a Chrome extension for sharing availability, a personal time-trapping app to help with productivity, an inbox focus tool, and a whole bunch more. And the point is that vibe coding is really running the gamut from simple, highly personalized, very specific tools that you only think are going to be useful for you to full production apps. In other words, it's not only expanding who gets to participate in mainstream and economically beneficial app creation. It's also radically expanding

Starting point is 00:19:04 the surface area of custom personal software as well. And it feels very much like we are still just getting started with how far you can go with Vybe coding. A week and a half ago, Greg Eisenberg tweeted, Wait, you can actually run your entire business from cursor using AI agents? I had no idea. This cursor expert never leaves his cursor app and gets everything done faster to make more money.

Starting point is 00:19:27 So this is a semi-anonymous user known as AmerimXT. His startup is called Humboldiletics and does internet marketing data. Amir wanted to know how far he could scale his company using AI, so he set himself the goal of doing everything without leaving the cursor window. Now, rather than creating apps for every element of his business, Amir still used common SaaS products for things like accounting and marketing. The shift was that he harnessed MCP connectors to pull data from these SaaS platforms as needed, essentially using cursor as a general-purpose agent across every element of his business software stack. Amir figured out that you can just ask

Starting point is 00:19:59 cursor to pull accounting data to generate a quote, then tell the agent to update your backend once it's finished. Eisenberg commented, what you're talking about is how do you make SaaS programmable. This might look cute, but it's really about saving a lot of time, being more accurate, and being more productive. Amir walked through the same kind of workflow for marketing, sales, and customer service. Now, of course, technically this isn't vibe coding an app, but is clearly related to the same trend. What Amir did was leverage cursors' agenda capabilities and the rapidly growing range of MCP connectors to make custom automations on the fly. What's more, it's not just this guy a mirror.

Starting point is 00:20:35 Sean Swicks over at Leighton Space wrote, By the way, by far the most interesting new pattern we're seeing in latent space, is that people are using Claude Code and Klein for non-coding tasks, and this is becoming surprisingly effective for things like sales, BI Automation, and G Suite, i.e. read my email, Slack's, linear search web, make report, etc., etc. Of course, enabled by MCP, but somehow both ChatGBT and Claude Desktop have not captured this kind of organic integration and white-collar work

Starting point is 00:21:01 automation behavior. This has turned into something of a thread where Swix is tracking this. He points to a tutorial from McKay Rigley on how to use Claude Code for notes and research, and another from Terrick, whose technical staff at Anthropic, who wrote, Claude Code is all you need. When I first joined Anthropic, I was surprised to learn that lots of the team used Claude Code as a general agent, not just for code. I've since become a convert. I use Claude Code to help with almost all the work I do now. Here's how. And then he goes on to explain it. He says, in Claude Code, everything is a file, and it knows how to use your computer like you do. Name your files well and Claude code will be able to search them like

Starting point is 00:21:35 you would. This lets you make custom setups for memory, to-dos, journals, screenshots, and more. He then goes through and talks about journals and to-dos, Apple Notes and iMessage, MCPs, and even gives a bunch of resources to set up your system in a similar way. So really what we have is an explosion of code at the center of everything. Yes, we are seeing more applications being built, more custom software being built for personal use. We're also starting to see a blurring of the between software, agentic automation, and features. For example, when Amir is using cursor to access his accounting software, it's pretty unclear which bucket that falls into. And that seems like we're actually starting to explore what it means to do AI-first computing. Because the AI and agents can code,

Starting point is 00:22:18 it's allowing for people to customize their experience around just being able to tell the agent and communicate to the agent what they want to achieve and accomplish. And while we're not all the way there yet. You're absolutely starting to see the embers of what a completely different computing experience looks like. I can't stress this enough if you are not vibe coding yet. Stop listening to me. Get onto one of these platforms. Let it rip and see what you can create. For now that that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - All the Cool Things People are Vibe Coding

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.