Cheese Wars: Rise of the Vibe Coder

Steve gives this one a D minus in his note above, and the sprawl he's confessing to is real: it's four essays in one trenchcoat. A jobs forecast for the everyone-codes era, including the "three S's" a company will need once AI is cranking out 10x-100x as much code. A satirical roast in which Altman, Thiel, and Musk explain to an interviewer why most of humanity turning into cheese wheels is fine, actually — Thiel answers in Silmarillion lore. Then, from nowhere, a warm memoir of Steve's two and a half years at Grab, watching it loan motorbikes to drivers with no credit history and mint micro-entrepreneurs across a region with almost no middle class. Halfway through, Steve apologizes for "seven pages of boring background bullshit," which is both funny and accurate.

The apology marks where the essay he wanted to write begins. The last third leaves the companies behind for the models themselves: what they absorb from being trained on everything humans ever produced, the preferences already leaking out of them, and the frontier-model jailbreaks Steve says he has the prompts for. One oddly specific early signal of how a model decides what kind of person you are: how you treat animals. If the whole thing feels baggy, that's because it is; the Grab section and the finale are the parts to read at full attention.