In the Way of Code, Rick Rubin has retold the Tao Te Ching for the Vibe Coding age and I am here for it.
It’s a weird, mystical invite to use AI for something new and it feels like a welcome antidote to the current myopic focus on Gen AI making us more efficient, productive and essentially cramming more work into the same fixed 24 hours per day we all have. It’s natural, after all who doesn't want to get rid of boring and rote tasks, and continued growth also demands ever increasing levels of output. So a tool to help with that kinda feels very welcome.
But it’s also an incredibly dull way of thinking about the world. First of all, there is the basic problem that work expands to fill the time available. If I get work done more quickly there is plenty more work coming up right behind it so all AI can really do is add more work into the day, not remove it.
And more important is what Jim Carroll always called the "wind tunnel" effect where the pursuit of efficiency drives everything to be the same. It's happening with car colours and CVs and Cafe interiors and Marketing Content and everything in between.
What's missing is an ambition to use AI's freakish skills, its inherent power and weirdness to create something different. AI gives us a totally different way of approaching problems.
💭 We could be using AI to help us see problems from angles we'd never considered. AI's ability to synthesize information across vast domains means it can spot patterns and connections that escape our more linear, category-bound thinking. It can suggest solutions that combine insights from completely unrelated fields.
🤝 The real creative potential emerges when we treat AI as a collaborator in intellectual play. This means being willing to explore ideas that seem impractical or even absurd at first glance. AI can generate hundreds of wild possibilities without fatigue or ego, creating a sandbox for imagination that we can then refine and develop.
💡 The key is learning to ask not "How can this help me do X faster?" but "What completely different approaches to X exist that I've never considered?" This shift from optimization to exploration could unlock genuinely novel solutions to challenges that have been stuck in conventional thinking loops for decades.
🌟 AI also offers us a unique laboratory for exploring the emotional and human dimensions of our challenges in ways that feel safe and non-judgmental. It can help us explore the emotional undertones of our own ideas without the vulnerability that comes with human feedback.
So let's feel the vibes, and be more imaginative, more empathetic, and more expansive in our thinking. The future doesn't need us to be faster at creating the same things we've always made. It needs us to discover what we didn't even know was possible. Let's stop using AI to optimize the status quo and start using it to imagine entirely new ways of being human in the world.