Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Amazon’s retail chief shifts from Bezos era

• Artificial Intelligence: Scale AI’s billionaire CEO eyes a grander stage in politics

• Plus, our Recommendations: Death at 28,000 feet; a VC tells all; and an unapologetically twisty apocalypse show

“It was like strapping on an Iron Man suit and flying around,” said Jon Stokes, co-founder of Symbolic AI. “I felt like Tony Stark—it was insane.” 

Stokes was recounting his recent two-day binge using Claude Code to work on a project for his San Francisco-based startup. Like many techies lately, he was “vibe coding,” a buzzy phrase that describes someone prompting artificial intelligence with natural language to create and examine code—just as someone else might ask AI to write an email or summarize research. Stokes estimates Claude Code, a tool released just a couple weeks ago by Anthropic, dramatically reduced the amount of time he spent on his coding project: What took him about two days would’ve taken him several weeks without Claude Code, he said. It went fast—Tony Stark fast. 

Vibe coding arrives in our lexicon apparently from Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI and Tesla executive, who seems to have coined the phrase in a Feb. 2 tweet in which he described “a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials”—the rapid changes in AI’s ability to code—“and forget that the code even exists.” 

Karpathy went on to discuss how he’d been coding lately with AI from Anthropic and Anysphere, a fast-growing startup that makes a popular code-editing tool called Cursor, and those efforts didn’t require him to interact very much with the code itself. Instead, he could prompt the AI and let it do much of the grunt work. 

“I ask for the dumbest things like ‘decrease the padding on the sidebar by half’ because I'm too lazy to find it...When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it,” Karpathy wrote. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

People have been using AI chatbots for help with coding tasks for some time, but AI has gotten much better at it recently thanks to the development of new reasoning models as well as agentic AI programs—both significant improvements in how AI can think through problems and put a plan into action. 

Vibe coding sounds great—almost like AI has advanced to the point where I can go to Claude Code and ask it to “make an Age of Empires-style game that focuses on Renaissance Europe” and expect it to come back with something I can just drag onto my desktop and play. That’s not the case. While AI has gotten much more sophisticated in coding lately, the tools are just that—tools. They’re best at making experienced developers more efficient and particularly useful at quickly getting together code that can get demoed and then further refined. In the hands of a novice coder, they’re practically useless. (I know—I tried.)

“You have to have at least a high level concept of what you want your code to do,” said Bojan Tunguz, a consultant and former Nvidia software engineer who has been vibe coding in his free time lately. He too has seen projects that might’ve taken weeks get condensed to a matter of days. “I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who has never coded at all.” 

Think of it this way: Just as AI cannot yet produce a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, none of the coding AI tools can spontaneously spit out the next Elden Ring or the next great smartphone app. They’re not even nearly as easy to use as, say, Wix’s program for assembling a website. Which means AI is far from ready to erase every coding job out there, but it is clear that jobs involving the lowest-skill coding work could get squeezed out. One end result: Software engineering may no longer be as surefire a path toward universal job security and a mid-six-figures salary as it has been.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

Amazon Retail Chief Shifts Culture Toward Lower Costs and—Gasp!—Some Slower Shipping

Amazon has ballooned so much in recent years it is almost possible to forget that the biggest chunk of its revenue comes selling everyday goods. (My orders from the past week: Polar seltzer, ground thyme, soy sauce, rice vinegar and a Rabbit champagne stopper, which I hope makes my sparkling wine habit a little more economical—a real necessity if those Trump tariffs go through.)  

Indeed, the company’s core retail business remains the bedrock of the giant business, and that makes the person running it, Doug Herrington, the most important person at Amazon behind only Jeff Bezos, who remains executive chairman, and CEO Andy Jassy, who took the job from Bezos in 2021. He has sought a different direction for the retail business since taking command of it a year after Jassy became CEO, our Theo Wayt explains in Weekend’s latest Big Read. 

Artificial Intelligence 

Scale AI’s Billionaire CEO Eyes Grander Stage in Politics

I give Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire CEO of Scale AI, real credit for his apparent powers of foresight—and reinvention. Scale, which bigger companies hire to fine tune their AI, has needed to rethink itself several times in the last few years, and as it faces new competition, Wang is pushing Scale away from its private sector work toward the public sector, according to this report from our Julia Black and Sylvia Varnham O’Regan. 

Of course, Scale’s government work stretches back several years, but with the new Trump administration, Wang has been working overtime to pitch Scale as a crucial government contractor. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, admits he didn’t reveal absolutely everything he has bought on Amazon lately. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “Extreme: Peak Danger” (BBC Sounds) 

At 28,251 feet tall, K2, the planet’s second-largest mountain, is such a remote place that it has proven to be easier for mankind to reach outer space than its summit. K2 stands just 1,000 feet smaller than Everest but is far more dangerous, with fewer climbing routes and available guides. (The very top of the mountain has a nickname: “the death zone.”)  By some estimates, nearly a quarter of the people who’ve attempted to summit K2 have died, and as the second season of “Extreme: Peak Danger” recounts, a particularly devastating moment occurred on the mountain in 2008, with more than 10 people killed in a mass avalanche. Their adventure is a reminder of how mortal danger can make a place like K2 that much more alluring.—A.B. 

Reading: “The Tell” by Amy Griffin 

It‘s rare—maybe even unprecedented—for a book to be supported by all three of the book club mavens: Oprah, Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager. But Amy Griffin’s "The Tell" is not a normal book. A moving memoir from the founder of G9 Ventures, based on a secret she kept long-hidden, the book has taken Griffin's very, very large network of very, very powerful women—from Gwyneth Paltrow to Wendi Murdoch to Lauren Sanchez—by storm. 

I've just started it, and I am riveted. Griffin wrote it in her direct and honest voice—the same voice she spoke with on stage (pictured above) at my WTF: Women in Tech, Media and Finance event last year. 

And while the facts of my childhood and young adulthood bear little resemblance to Griffin‘s, I find myself identifying with the road of self discovery she lays out. It’s no wonder the book has drawn so much attention. It doesn't hurt that Griffin has amassed a large following of women whom she has supported tirelessly for many years. 

Read “The Tell” if you are looking for a gripping tale or something to talk about at your next NYC cocktail party!—Jessica E. Lessin

Watching: “Paradise” (Hulu) 

For the better part of a decade, showrunner Dan Fogelman showed how a soapy family drama, “This Is Us,” could get turned up a couple notches: with twists galore. (Uncle Nicky’s alive! Daddy had a drinking problem! Other daddy is gay!) With “Paradise,” Fogelman applies the same narrative mechanism to a political potboiler, and dammit, it really works. After a stiff 40 minutes or so of setup, what seemed like a routine tale about the dogged protector (Sterling K. Brown) assigned to a reluctant president (James Marsden) quickly morphs. It’s actually an end-of-the-world story on top of everything else, and the mysteries around the characters could fill up more than a few mountain refuges: What caused the apocalypse? Who knew what—and when did they know it? What does cashew cheese taste like? Who’s trustworthy among the 25,000 survivors sequestered underground in a white-picket-fence community with as much genuine life as Main Street in Disneyland? Perhaps a better question: Is anyone trustworthy?—A.B.

Final Thought

Feels like a nationwide hallucination sometimes.