Fast Company's warning about the hidden risks of vibe coding and The New Yorker's interview with Lee Sung Jin on Beef's pivot from petty feuds to class warfare are, unexpectedly, about the same thing. Both interrogate the performance of competence in rooms where the actual skill floor has quietly dropped, and both ask who gets to be in those rooms to begin with.
Vibe Coding as Class Signifier
Vibe coding, using AI tools to generate functional software without deep technical knowledge, is being sold as democratisation. Fast Company's piece suggests it is more complicated: the hidden risks include security vulnerabilities, institutional liability, and the erosion of internal knowledge that cannot be easily reconstructed. But underneath the security argument is a class argument. The people most likely to vibe-code their way into consequential systems are already-credentialed professionals who can absorb the reputational risk if something goes wrong. Junior developers and outsourced teams who get caught doing the same thing face very different consequences. Lee Sung Jin makes an adjacent observation about Beef: that the Korean-American elite in his show operates by a different set of rules than the American elite, a double-performativity where you have to seem naturally excellent rather than visibly striving.
Founder Mode and the Performance of Control
Fast Company's simultaneous piece on whether founder mode is sustainable completes the triangle. Founder mode glorifies a specific performance of competence: the person who appears to have instinctive mastery of everything, from product to culture to hiring. Vibe coding is, in a sense, AI-assisted founder mode: technical authority performed without technical depth. The question Beef keeps asking is whether the performance eventually collapses under the weight of what it is concealing. For founders navigating the gap between perceived and actual capability, TurboFund's investor targeting guide is blunt about the fact that scattered outreach is its own form of performed competence that sophisticated investors see through immediately. A 2024 paper in Organization Science by Kanze et al. found that founders who perform confidence beyond their actual knowledge state receive 18 percent more initial funding but are significantly more likely to face investor disputes within 24 months. The vibe, eventually, has to code something real.