Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation.
However 2 things are very specific to this case:
1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.
2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.
I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?
I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way.
I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill?
If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment.
It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.
2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame.
On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
It's an attention market. You can monetize attention directly, speculate on anything that you believe will receive attention, go short on things you believe are overhyped. In that sense, it's not much different from prediction markets except even more anarchist.
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it.
Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas.
Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop.
But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump.
1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures
2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3
3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases
4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue.
I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift
> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now.
It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out.
The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere.
And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly.
So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job.
This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.
How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.
Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.
Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.
25 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] threadHowever 2 things are very specific to this case:
1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.
2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way. I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill? If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.
2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas.
Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop.
But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump.
1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures
2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3
3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases
4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue.
5. Search engines
6. Social networks
We need that Pump
Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now.
It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out.
The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere.
And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly.
So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job.
This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.