The New York Times columnist and Hard Fork podcast co-host might be a little too jazzed about vibecoding.
It’s generous of Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast, to pity people who are toiling away without the benefit of claudeswarms.
i follow AI adoption pretty closely, and i have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap.
people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.…— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) January 25, 2026
In a January 25 X post, Roose said that he has “never seen such a yawning gap” between Silicon Valley insiders like him and outsiders. He says the people he lives near are “putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision,” and “wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.”
Hard Fork involves a great deal of guffawing from Roose—mostly directed at his more comedically nimble co-host Casey Newton—so it’s not lost on me that Roose is trying to layer some irony and exaggeration on top of his condescension in this post. He takes that mask right off, however, in his next one, in which he says he wants “to believe that everyone can learn this stuff,” but frets that perhaps, “restrictive IT policies have created a generation of knowledge workers who will never fully catch up.”
Recent Hard Fork episodes have been unusually enthusiastic about vibecoding—using AI tools to perform speedy software engineering. Once upon a time, Github Copilot and ChatGPT caused software engineers’ eyes to bug out because they could write code like a person, and you could run the code, and the code would work. Since around 2021 AI’s knack for coding has been steadily improving, and steering certain software engineers toward prophesies of various forms of Armageddon.
For instance, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Claude parent company Anthropic, published one of these earlier today in the form of a 38-page blog post. “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.
