Vibe coding term is ~10 weeks old
Rick Rubin embraced the concept of vibe coding just 10 weeks after first encountering the phrase, turning it into a full book.
Snapshot · The a16z Show
Rick Rubin on AI, Creativity, and The Way of Code
Explore episode
Jul 1, 2026
Where this was said
What Is The Way of Code?
At 3:40 · chapter starts 2:46
Anjney Midha opens by accidentally calling The Way of Code an album — a reveal that perfectly captures the book's multimedia strangeness. Rubin explains that it began as a straightforward book, but after a conversation with Jack Clark on his Tetragrammaton podcast, Anthropic got involved and the project became an interactive website where users can vibe-code AI-generated art using the book's own text as prompts. [1] — Rick Rubin "The Way of Code started as a joke — then the Tao Te Ching became its backbone, and everything changed. A 3,000-year-old wisdom text turned …" 01:46 The visitor can ask the art to look like Cézanne, melt, go Nordic, or spin fast — an embodiment of the book's own argument. Rubin traces the unlikely origin story: he first encountered the phrase 'vibe coding' ten weeks before publishing, saw a photo of himself that looked AI-generated (but was real), found his image appearing alongside Cursor's '15 rules of vibe coding,' and eventually decided to write a joke book about something he knew nothing about. When the Tao Te Ching became the backbone, the joke turned profound.
All Art Is Sampling and Remixing
All art is remixing. The Beatles heard Roy Orbison and wrote 'Please Please Me' — that's sampling. AI doesn't change this dynamic; it just accelerates the iteration cycle that artists have always used.
AI Is a Tool, Not the Artist
The AI doesn't have a point of view — its point of view is whatever you tell it to be. Give the same script to 5 great directors and you get 5 different movies. AI just lets you get to those iterations faster.
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