Opportunity cost of information
The real rarity in life is time.
We are under constant pressure to optimize time utilization but need a way to stay informed.
When the information being published is huge, curating becomes important. But the last decade of Web 2.0 essentially eroded the value of a strong editorial board in-lieu of self publishing.
This means you have to curate it yourself.
But curating itself takes time as well.
Curating is not easy either - you’d have to spend maybe 1/3 of the time it would take to read the full content to determine if the content matches the type of information that you are looking for.
Would you rather curate information or spend time with your kids?
The tension is between opportunity cost and fomo (fear of missing out).
Vibe Coding
Vibe coding helps here. This morning I built a tool that iterates over a bunch of RSS feeds, looks for content published since last week, reads that content, summarizes it, and correlates it to a set of topics that I am particularly interested in.
Reading the summary sheet takes about 3 - 4 minutes. I can then decided if any of the articles are worth the additional time of reading (20 - 30 mins).
This allows me to balance opportunity cost and fomo.
This is nothing special
Vibe coders have been talking about this for a while but most of them were positioning it as a replacement to traditional software engineering. People with ideas and no background in programming can ship a product.
I don’t think that’s true but the reality of that still needs to be determined.
But on the personal side - where reliability, availability, correctness etc. are all determined by your own tolerance, Vibe coding provides an important alternative to consumer apps.
Consumer apps always meant that you had to learn their workflow and adjust to satisfy their design. Vibe coding means you can instead create a system that supports your way of working.
This is hugely liberating. There is a lot of stuff where I don’t want to share my private information with a startup - being able to code it myself would feel hugely empowering. But spending 3 weeks on an idea needs to compete with opportunity cost: I’d rather tickle my toddler.
Vibe coding personal projects is the new Kombucha. You can make it yourself, for yourself. There is no intention for a global distribution, industrialization, and retiring a billionaire.
But how do you share
When your friend comes over, you can let him try that Kombucha. He might like it. You might share your starter.
This is the last mile that needs solving with vibe coded personal apps.
Right now Apple and Google have huge moats around what can run on their devices. It is extremely painful to share a quick project unless everyone involved is software savvy.
On the other hand, alternatives suffered from not having access to the Google Play or Apple Appstore. But as we can vibe code personal app that solves problems for us better than other tools, and we can potentially vibe code a thin wrapper on tools like Spotify, the ecosystem becomes less important and an open-source hardware reality more sustainable.
In a way, vibe coding is not going to effect software engineers - its going to affect platform providers who use their moat to maintain users.
Apple’s gotta start trying a lot harder in the coming years.