It’s beneficiant of Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast, to pity people who find themselves toiling away with out the good thing about claudeswarms.
i comply with AI adoption fairly intently, and i’ve by no means seen such a yawning inside/outdoors hole.
individuals in SF are placing multi-agent claudeswarms accountable for their lives, consulting chatbots earlier than each resolution, wireheading to a level solely sci-fi writers dared to think about.…
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) January 25, 2026
In a January 25 X publish, Roose stated that he has “never seen such a yawning gap” between Silicon Valley insiders like him and outsiders. He says the individuals he lives close to are “putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision,” and “wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.”
Hard Fork includes an excessive amount of guffawing from Roose—principally directed at his extra comedically nimble co-host Casey Newton—so it’s not misplaced on me that Roose is attempting to layer some irony and exaggeration on high of his condescension on this publish. He takes that masks proper off, nonetheless, in his subsequent one, by which he says he desires “to believe that everyone can learn this stuff,” however frets that maybe, “restrictive IT policies have created a generation of knowledge workers who will never fully catch up.”
Recent Hard Fork episodes have been unusually passionate about vibecoding—utilizing AI instruments to carry out speedy software program engineering. Once upon a time, Github Copilot and ChatGPT prompted software program engineers’ eyes to bug out as a result of they may write code like an individual, and you can run the code, and the code would work. Since round 2021 AI’s knack for coding has been steadily bettering, and steering sure software program engineers towards prophesies of varied types of Armageddon.
For occasion, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Claude guardian firm Anthropic, printed one among these earlier right this moment in the type of a 38-page weblog publish. “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.
Roose and Newton should not, before everything, software program engineers, however Roose just lately used Claude Code to make an app referred to as Stash, an expertise he talked about on Hard Fork. Stash is a read-later app like the discontinued Pocket, or the still-extant Instapaper. Stash, in accordance with Roose, does “what I used to use Pocket for. Except now I own it and I can make changes to the app. And I made it, I would say in about two hours.” Well finished. Sincerely.
In one other episode of Hard Fork, listeners supplied their very own tales about what they’ve been vibecoding. Presumably these individuals didn’t used to code, and now they’re coding, which is admittedly form of cool. One constructed a instrument for wallpaper purchasers to calculate how a lot wallpaper they should purchase. Another constructed a gamification system for his youngsters’ home tasks.
With all due respect to those individuals and the neat stuff they’re pulling off with vibecoding, that is simply individuals giving themselves busywork for enjoyable. There’s nothing fallacious with that, however that’s what it’s.
It’s true that most individuals don’t have the data to carry out software program engineering duties, and it’s intriguing to attempt vibecoding if, like me, you’ve by no means coded something. I’ve had LLMs make some rudimentary side-scrolling video games, construct ray-traced 3-D environments in javascript, and carry out another little experiments that glitched out. I realized slightly about LLMs, but it surely didn’t change my life.
Then once more, I, like many individuals, am bored by optimization and productiveness hacks, and it’s not in my nature to have software program concepts which can be purely software program. In uncommon instances the place I really feel a artistic spark that includes coding, the coding tends to be a small a part of the concept, and the remainder of the concept tends to contain much more partaking with the world than an LLM can do. For occasion, I reside in a type of neighborhoods the place individuals go nuts with their Halloween decorations, and I’ve daydreamed about organising festive garden animatronics, however vibecoding a management system would solely get me to this point in the strategy of configuring my monsters. Most of the precise work can be me out in my yard with an influence drill, wires, and stakes, futzing with my werewolf dummy, and Claude Code isn’t on the verge of getting that factor to remain upright on my garden.
Roose and different AI fanatics are speaking these days as if It’s. Finally. Here. They make it sound as if AI is absolutely about to take off, and the normies must strap in.
Next 6 months are going to be actually bizarre. https://t.co/TAtAomZQzb
— Alex Graveley (@alexgraveley) January 25, 2026
When Roose talks about these benighted “knowledge workers” outdoors of San Francisco, if he solely means software program engineers struggling to perform duties that may very well be carried out by claudeswarms (Claudeswarms, in case you’re questioning, appear to be little digital coder hives that perform advanced coding duties), I believe his pity is misplaced. If AI-inclined coders should not allowed to make use of the newest AI instruments whereas they’re on the clock, they usually’re additionally software program engineers of their spare time, it stands to motive that they’re taking part in with AI toys at house in the event that they wish to.
And there may be little doubt that, half-joking or not, Roose’s expertise of individuals in the Bay Area “wireheading” and continually asking chatbots for all times recommendation is actual. That’s to be anticipated. They have quite a lot of different issues too, like a horrifying new behavior of injecting themselves with peptide options they purchased on-line.
It’s in no way shocking that folks in San Francisco suppose AI is about to turn into the closest doable factor to a god, as a result of it feels prefer it’s near being the factor lots of people in San Francisco suppose is a god: a software program engineer. An comprehensible mistake.
But the remainder of the pathetic data staff who aren’t blessed to be in the AI haven of San Francisco don’t essentially consider software program engineers are all that highly effective, and a few of us are counting the months till subsequent Halloween, and AI isn’t going to be a lot assist getting our latex clowns to look scary by then. It in all probability by no means will, and that’s high quality.
