Naval

“So around December of 2025, the coding agents in AI hit an inflection point with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, and people started using it and were like, wow, this is an agent that stays on track, can build apps soup to nuts, can solve thorny problems, and really feels like having a junior programmer at your disposal who's fast, essentially free, and ready to please. That was an inflection point, and I was reading all the hype on Twitter, but this time it felt real. And I've tried the coding agents in the past with some mixed results, but this time I really got into it. And I haven't seriously coded in decades.”

“So I actually built my own little app store, which is an app store just for me. I can ask it for an app, it can deliver that app to my app store, which is a web page, and eventually I made it into an app itself that lives on my iPhone. And then I can download those apps with one click, and I can get upgrades like you do with the app store. So if I want a new app, for example, that tracks my workouts, and I have this, I built a custom tracking app for just my workouts exactly the way I like it.”

“And it's very addictive because like in a video game, the way a video game is designed is that it keeps you hooked by giving you feedback and rewards for doing work. And it's always at the edge of your capability. So as you get better, the video game gets harder. It's not so hard that it's frustrating, but it's not so easy that it's boring. So you're always operating at the edge of your capability with the video game and getting these rewards. But those rewards are fake. And the video game is bounded, it's created by other humans. It's sort of a fake little world. And deep down, you kind of know that. So you're just figuring out the rules of the game. Except with Vibe Coding, it's unbounded, because now you've got a touring machine running underneath, you can build anything.”

“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.”

“And by the way, I do this all the time. I'll stop the model and I'll say, no, that's a hack, that's a patch. Go fix it at an architectural level. And what's funny is the model will always say, oh, I'm sorry, you're right, that was a hack. Even if that wasn't a hack, the model will say, you're right, that was a hack. So the model is always trying to please you, and it doesn't know any better. In that sense, it's a little bit like a dog. It's better than you at catching that duck, if you're duck hunting with a dog. But it's still a dog. So if you point it at a bird, you know, that's not a duck, it might take that bird down instead.”

“Claude has really good visual presentation to the system called Artifacts. And Claude is very good at talking to me at the level that I'm at. Chat GPT is still the OG. It's sort of very good all around. Gemini is very good at search because it has the Google crawl underneath. And then Grok is the one I can count on to tell me the truth. It's like the least neutered, least nerfed. It's got access to X, so it's very good at news. And it's very good at technical problems.”

“I think Apple giving up an AI will go down as the biggest strategic mistake in the tech industry of this decade, and it's the beginning of the end of Apple's dominance. These companies can exist for a long time and make lots of money, like Microsoft is more valuable than it's ever been. But Microsoft Windows has kind of lost the battle, because they missed the mobile phone wave. They stuck to Windows OS, and they didn't upgrade to a touchscreen-based native OS designed for phones from the ground up.”

“The other thing is, within the app that I'm building, I have a bug reporting infrastructure, where someone sees a bug, they tap on a button, the bug sends the logs up and the bug files into a server, and then I have Claude go every 24 hours through all the bug reports, and it just fixes them all by itself without my having to intervene, and it puts all the fixes into side branches for me to review. Because in a sense, the agents can do perfect customer service. If your customer service was perfect, your customer service person would also be an incredible coder and would be indefatigable.”