Software Pump and Dump

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 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.

>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.

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”.

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.

Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)

Webpage is down for me?

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.

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.