On AI and the Future of Work

Nivi: Hey, this is Nivi. You’re listening to the Naval Podcast. For the first time in recorded history, we are not at the same location. I am actually walking around town and Naval might be doing the same, so there might be some ambient noise, but we are going to try hard to remove that with AI and some good audio engineering.

Naval: Podcast recording is so stilted, because it’s like you have to sit down and you schedule something, and you have this giant mic pointing in your face and it’s not casual. It makes it just less authentic—more practiced, more rehearsed. I get that it produces maybe higher-quality audio and video, but I feel like it produces lower-quality conversation.

Nivi: And we all know brains run better when they’re being locomoted and you’re moving around or just going for walks.

Naval: Absolutely. My brain is powered by my legs.

Nivi: I pulled out some tweets from Naval on the topic of AI. We want to talk a little bit about AI and hopefully talk about it in a more timeless manner than a timely manner, but I think some of it’s going to be non-timeless content.

Naval: Yeah, there’s a tendency with the internet commentators where they’ll look at something said five years ago and jump and say, “Aha! Well, that turned out to be false.”

Well, yes, of course. No one can predict the future. That’s the nature of the future. If we could predict it, we’d be there already.

So it’s always dangerous to talk about the future when people listening aren’t aware of that, but just be charitable. We are obviously talking about things in February of 2026, and we’re working with the information we have now, and not with perfect hindsight.

And so unless you have your own predictions that you put out there on a risky basis—risky, narrow, precise predictions that are falsifiable—to compare to, then there’s no basis for saying somebody was right or somebody else was wrong.

If You Want to Learn, Do

Nivi: Before we jump into the tweets, do you want to say anything about what you’re doing with your time or what you’re doing at Impossible?

Naval: Not really. We’re working on a very difficult project—that’s why it’s called Impossible—with an amazing team, and it’s really exciting building something again. It’s very pure, starting over from the bottom. It’s always day one. I guess I just wasn’t satisfied being an investor, and I certainly don’t want to be a philosopher or just a media personality or a commentator. Because I think people who just talk too much and don’t do anything… they haven’t encountered reality.

They haven’t gotten feedback—the harsh feedback from free markets or from physics or nature—and so after a while it ends up becoming just too much armchair philosophy. You probably have noticed my recent tweets have been much more practical and pragmatic, although there are still occasional ethereal or generic ones, but it’s more grounded in the reality of working every day.

And I just like working with a great team to create something that I want to see exist. So hopefully we’ll create something that will come to fruition and people will say, “Wow, that’s great. I want that also,” or maybe not, but it’s in the doing that you learn.

Vibe Coding Is the New Product Management

Nivi: So I pulled out a tweet from a couple days ago, February 3rd: “Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding.”

Naval: There’s been a shift—a marked pronouncement in the last year and especially in the last few months—most pronounced by Claude Code, which is a specific model that has a coding engine in it, which is so good that I think now you have vibe coders, which are people who didn’t really code much or hadn’t coded in a long time, who are using essentially English as a programming language—as an input into this code bot—which can do end-to-end coding.

Instead of just helping you debug things in the middle, you can describe an application that you want. You can have it lay out a plan, you can have it interview you for the plan. You can give it feedback along the way, and then it’ll chunk it up and will build all the scaffolding.

It’ll download all the libraries and all the connectors and all the hooks, and it’ll start building your app and building test harnesses and testing it. And you can keep giving it feedback and debugging it by voice, saying, “This doesn’t work. That works. Change this. Change that,” and have it build you an entire working application without your having written a single line of code.

For a large group of people who either don’t code anymore or never did, this is mind-blowing.

This is taking them from idea space, and opinion space, and from taste directly into product. So that’s what I mean—product management has taken over coding. Vibe coding is the new product management.

Instead of trying to manage a product or a bunch of engineers by telling them what to do, you’re now telling a computer what to do. And the computer is tireless. The computer is egoless, and it’ll just keep working. It’ll take feedback without getting offended.

You can spin up multiple instances. It’ll work 24/7 and you can have it produce working output.

What does that mean? Just like now anybody can make a video or anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don’t have one already in the App Store, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to what we’re going to see.

However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used or they’re competitive? No. I think it’s going to break into two kinds of things.

First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there’s no demand for average.

Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job. So first of all, you just have more shots on goal. So there will be more of the best. There will be a lot more niches getting filled.

You might have wanted an application for a very specific thing, like tracking lunar phases in a certain context, or a certain kind of personality test, or a very specific kind of video game that made you nostalgic for something. Before, the market just wasn’t large enough to justify the cost of an engineer coding away for a year or two. But now the best vibe coding app might be enough to scratch that itch or fill that slot. So a lot more niches will get filled, and as that happens, the tide will rise.

The best applications—those engineers themselves are going to be much more leveraged. They’ll be able to add more features, fix more bugs, smooth out more of the edges. So the best applications will continue to get better. A lot more niches will get filled.

And even individual niches—such as you want an app that’s just for your own very specific health tracking needs, or for your own very specific architectural layout or design—that app that could have never existed will now exist.

We should expect—just like on the internet—what’s happened with Amazon, where you replaced a bunch of bookstores with one super bookstore and a zillion long-tail sellers; or YouTube replaced a bunch of medium-sized TV stations and broadcast networks with one giant aggregator called YouTube, or maybe a second one called Netflix, and then a whole long tail of content producers.

So the same way, the App Store model will become even more extreme, where you will have one or two giant app stores helping you filter through all of the AI slop apps out there, and then at the very head, there’ll be a few huge apps that will become even bigger because now they can address a lot more use cases or just be a lot more polished. And then there’ll be a long tail of tiny little apps filling every niche imaginable.

As the Internet reminds us, the real power and wealth—super wealth—goes to the aggregator. But there’s also a huge distribution of resources into the long tail. It’s the medium-sized firms that get blown apart—the 5, 10, 20-person software companies that were filling a niche for an enterprise use case that can now be either vibe coded away, or the lead app in the space can now encompass that use case.

Training Models Is the New Coding

Naval: So if anyone can code then what is coding? Coding still exists in a couple of areas. The most obvious place that coding exists is in training these models themselves. There are many different kinds of models. There are new ones coming out every day, there are different ones for different domains. We’re going to see different models for biology, for programming. We’re going to see pointed, focused models for sensors. We’re going to see models for CAD, for design.

We’re going to see models for 3D and graphics and games, models for video. You’re going to see many different kinds of models. The people who are creating these models are essentially programming them. But they’re programmed in a very different way than ...