“Naval: There’s never been a better time to be alive as a creator of software.
Now, are the same market opportunities still there? That’s a big question. They’re shifting very, very fast. It may be the case that the big companies are vulnerable because now anyone can create software.
It may be the case that they have more of an advantage because they have distribution. They can just fill all the gaps with all the software they can dream up. But I actually think this is a renaissance for individual software creators.
Now, one other tweet that I put out was something like, “There’s no market for venture-backed software anymore,” or, “Pure software is not venture investable anymore.”
Nivi: I think it was like, “Pure software is rapidly becoming uninvestable,” if I remember correctly.
Naval: Yeah, that’s a watered-down version of what I really wanted to say, which is that pure software is uninvestable. I would just full stop right there. If your whole advantage is like, “Hey, I’m building cool software that other people don’t know how to build,” I think that’s uninvestable.
And it’s uninvestable for two reasons.
One is they can just hack it together today. And the second is the coding agents are getting better so quickly that within a year, or even less, they’ll probably be building scalable software with good architecture. So I think we’re going to see leaps and bounds improvements. That genie is out of the bottle.
So if you’re a venture investor now, you’re looking for hardware, you’re looking for network effects, you’re looking for AI models. And I would argue that training AI models is the new building software for however long that lasts until autoresearch and autotraining starts working.
But I think vibe coding, it’s more fun than playing video games. It’s more productive. It’s more constructive. It has better feedback loops. You build something you want. You’re at the bleeding edge of technology. You may even make some money or career out of it—although careers are kind of dead—but you may make an interesting opportunity out of it. And you learn a lot about computers just by doing.
I’ve seen kids who are vibe coding. It’s hard to get kids to program. You can throw Swift Playgrounds and ScratchJr and all of that at them and hope that they pick up coding. But if you throw vibe coding at them, they’re going to get instant feedback and instant rewards. Maybe along the way they’ll pick up fundamentals because these things still require some skill to operate.
And in the process of operating them, you’ll be forced to figure out the command line; and you’ll be forced to figure out how basic computer architecture works; and you’ll be forced to figure out concepts like caching, and backing off in a network, and sharing streams, and writing to disk; and latency versus bandwidth trade-offs, et cetera, and all of those things. So you’ll be forced to learn some basics of computer algorithms and architecture. And it’s just a fun way to go.
I’ve been up late nights, probably spending a couple hours every night—the time that used to go into reading, or doomscrolling, or playing video games—is all now in vibe coding. In fact, that’s why I haven’t been active on X recently. I’ve been completely missing on X because I’m buried in Claude and Codex.”
Full episode: https://youtu.be/lIUEJqIDPcA
