Nostr notes by Marketoonist (Unofficial)

Vibe Coding I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about the ...

2026-10-27T03:11:01Z

Vibe Coding

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about the promise and pitfalls of “vibe coding.” Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI and Tesla AI alum, famously coined the term last year, defining it as “a new kind of coding … where you fully give in to the vibes … and forget that the code even exists.”
Last month Merriam-Webster announced it was adding “vibe coding” to the dictionary. Collins Dictionary named it their 2025 word of the year.
The idea of non-technical people building technical things is stirring up both panic and enthusiasm, depending on whose vibes we’re talking about.
The risks are real. In March 2025, a non-technical founder proudly posted that he’d built his SaaS app with “zero hand-written code.” Two days later, attackers were exploiting basic security holes. Within a week, the app was shut down.
It’s easy to imagine the pandemonium of skunkworks projects like that popping up in every corner of an organization.
But as my friend Scott Brinker found in his research with UserEvidence, the actual rise of vibe coding in marketing is not so scary. Most projects are contained and empowering marketers.
I love how Scott frames this, so I want to quote it at length:
“It’s a straw man argument. Nobody’s advocating for anarchy, blithely letting anyone build anything. Vibe coding can and should be done within guardrails and governance. Don’t be thrown by the ‘vibe’ language. It’s not the business operations equivalent of the free love movement. It’s people solving problems and innovating their work, using the latest tools of their trade. That’s exactly what we want people to be doing.
“‘But non-engineers can’t build good software!’ I call bull****. Sorry, but that blanket dismissal drives me nuts. First, most vibe-coded projects aren’t architecting the Eiffel Tower. They’re usually small, simple programs. Second, those builders know more about their domain — the problems to solve, the opportunities to seize — than any non-domain developer ever could, no matter how great of a software engineer they are.”
Scott also shares a quote from Airtable alum David Peterson that I’d never heard:
“When the person who feels the pain is also empowered to build the solution, the result is magical and utterly unique.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
Human in the Loop - March 2026
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5 Stages of AI Adoption - February 2026
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AI Productivity and Workslop - October 2025
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The post Vibe Coding first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne.

https://marketoonist.com/2026/10/vibe-coding.html

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#vibecoding #cart #add #cartcorporate #licensepaid #corporateblog #cartlooking #cartshare #post #sponsoredpost

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Marketing to AI Agents I drew this week’s cartoon thinking ...

2026-10-20T03:06:46Z

Marketing to AI Agents

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about this strange period of figuring out how to market to the agents that (I almost wrote “who”) are increasingly shopping on customers’ behalf.
Morgan Stanley estimates that AI shopping agents could account for 10% to 20% of US e-commerce by 2030.
And the way that AI agents shop is very different than humans. Here’s how Aviv Shamny, co-founder of a brand visibility company called Limy, describes it in a piece from Brent Crane in the New York Times:
“When you advertise to humans, you target eyeballs, emotions and dopamine, but when you advertise to agents, you advertise to logic, a very mathematical logic.”
I picked the “41 shades of blue” as a callback to a famous user test at Google. As Doug Bowman, Google’s former top designer, complained in a farewell note in 2009, Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they tested 41 shades in between.
The story was mocked as data-driven design gone wild. And yet Google later claimed that the right blue earned the company an extra $200 million a year. People can be influenced by subtle design choices like that.
Contrast that approach with AI shopping agents that read brand and product pages as text and data rather than as design. They pull prices, specs, reviews, and policies, comparing options against a shopper’s criteria, and skip anything they can’t parse.
A brand’s colors, imagery, and “emotional resonance” — many of the things that marketers spend a lot of time thinking about — barely register.
Automated traffic across the web increased nearly 8X faster than human activity last year, according to cybersecurity firm HUMAN Security.
Some brands are responding with wholesale shifts. Time Magazine has even started serving ads just for AI agents. Certain websites now seem written more for AI agents than people.
And yet the very approach that might appeal to agents might be what’s off-putting to humans.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
Marketing AI Agents - May 2025
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the evolution of advertising - November 2017
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Future of Search - February 2024
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The post Marketing to AI Agents first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne.

https://marketoonist.com/2026/10/marketing-to-ai-agents.html

https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/themes/marketoonist/assets/images/iconmonstr-shopping-cart-8-icon-white.svg

#cart #add #cartshare #agents #cartcorporate #cartlooking #sponsoredpost #viewcart #licensepaid #corporateblog

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Lifecycle of Innovation I drew this week’s cartoon thinking ...

2026-10-16T03:32:49Z

Lifecycle of Innovation

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about two common innovation pitfalls: feature creep and over-serving the market.
A company starts by meeting a customer need. Then it adds features to chase more profitable customers upmarket. Eventually it outstrips what the average customer needs or wants to pay for. A low-end disruptor comes along, and customers switch.
Zoom is a classic case in point. When it launched, it disrupted bloated enterprise incumbents like Skype for Business or Cisco Webex. But Zoom has since become the bloated incumbent, rebranding as an “AI-first work platform” with an AI Companion, meeting summaries, and other tools the average customer doesn’t need or want to pay for.
Email newsletters are another example. The once-disruptive Mailchimp grew into a full marketing automation suite for larger businesses, opening the door for newsletter-focused platforms like Beehiiv.
Now Beehiiv is turning itself into an all-in-one media platform with podcasts, communities, websites, and an AI copilot. Last week it announced a major price hike to pay for it all, sending some customers to look for the next low-end alternative.
One of the high points of business school for me was taking Clayton Christensen’s class a few years after he published The Innovator’s Dilemma. He coined the term “disruptive innovation” and gave us the theory for this lifecycle.
What struck me most from his course and book is that management isn’t being stupid or irrational by following this well-worn path.
Unlike Cory Doctorow’s model of “enshittification,” where managers knowingly extract value from customers until the product degrades, the managers in Christensen’s model are making good decisions based on the incentives in front of them.
That’s what makes it a dilemma.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
lifecycle of innovation - November 2002
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evolution of new products - September 2019
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product proliferation - April 2018
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The post Lifecycle of Innovation first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne.

https://marketoonist.com/2026/10/lifecycle-of-innovation-2.html

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