A Return to Code

**Nivi** (0:00)
Hi, you're listening to the Naval podcast. This is Nivi, his regular co-host.
Today, we're going to talk about AI and Vibe coding. This episode is presented by Angelist, a company Naval and I started more than a few years ago at this point. I'll tell you a little bit more about it later. Let me tee up the conversation with a tweet from Naval from March 23rd.
AI coding agents can now deliver one-shot custom apps straight to your phone. It's the beginning of the end for the iPhone's dominance. Do you want to talk about what you're building and how you're distributing it?

**Naval** (0:38)
Well, yeah, let me talk about Vibe coding and how I got into it. So around December of 2025, the coding agents in AI hit an inflection point with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, and people started using it and were like, wow, this is an agent that stays on track, can build apps soup to nuts, can solve thorny problems, and really feels like having a junior programmer at your disposal who's fast, essentially free, and ready to please. That was an inflection point, and I was reading all the hype on Twitter, but this time it felt real.
And I've tried the coding agents in the past with some mixed results, but this time I really got into it. And I haven't seriously coded in decades. I have a computer science degree, I understand computer architecture and networking, little bit of chips, algorithms, etc. But I haven't seriously coded in a long time.
And the activation energy to writing code is really high. You have to hook up all these different services to each other. Everything from GitHub to maybe some backend, you're doing Vercel or Firebase or Railway or whatever. Just lots of things to connect together. You have to know lots of jargon, lots of tools. And the AI now makes it really easy.
So I started with Claude code like everybody else. I've also used Codex for some of the thornier bug solving and deep problems. And I immediately got addicted. It was incredibly fun.
And so what's changed? Well, the agents are really working. These are not just coding assist now where you ask it to solve a specific problem. It gives you a pile of code, then you cut and paste that into your IDE, your development environment.
Rather, you open up a terminal CLI, as I call it, the command line interface. It's all text based, which is what these things are really good at, because they're trained on text tokens in the first place. It's running Unix inside or underneath. And these agents really know Unix because if you look at all the code out there that they were trained on sitting on GitHub or elsewhere or Stack Overflow, most of it was Unix. And most of the modern OS is really Unix underneath anyway. Mac OS is famously BSD. So underneath these are all Unix, which is all text in, text out.
So these agents are just long-lived coding AIs that are connected to Unix at a core level. They're connected to the Unix shell so that they can execute commands. They're connected to the file system through basic Unix commands.
They can call all the Unix commands like grep and awk and sed and pipe and so on, all these operators, they daisy chain into each other. They can run cron jobs so they can be long-lived. And they can spawn more shells and more tasks as needed. It's very addictive because normally with coding, coding can be really fun once you get into it. But getting into it, the activation energy is really high. But now all of a sudden, you don't have to know all the tools and all the commands. These things speak English. AIs are incredible translators and one of their core use cases early on was machine translation. They were tested on translating. But now they're translating from Python and C and Lisp and Rust and all of these various programming dialects and all of these specialized commands. And they're communicating in English. And they're very forgiving in their communication. So you can use different words, you can make spelling mistakes, you can explain things your own way. But if you have a basic understanding of computer architecture and networking and programming, and it doesn't take a lot, it can be very basic, actually, very high level, I should say. Not basic in the sense that it's simplistic, but basic in the sense that it's high level. Then you can go very, very far. And so just for fun, I tried building a bunch of different apps, and I started by one-shotting particular apps that I wanted. One-shotting mean I just give it a description, it gives me back an app. And then I started improving from there. So I actually built my own little app store, which is an app store just for me. I can ask it for an app, it can deliver that app to my app store, which is a web page, and eventually I made it into an app itself that lives on my iPhone. And then I can download those apps with one click, and I can get upgrades like you do with the app store. So if I want a new app, for example, that tracks my workouts, and I have this, I built a custom tracking app for just my workouts exactly the way I like it. So I can say, hey, use the functionality of Tonal and Ladder, follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to make it look like an Apple app, track my workouts the following way. Here's a text log of my last few workouts, and make it easy for me to re-enter new ones and to adjust them. Build me pretty graphs and charts to track my progress, add in whatever other features you can think of, calculate strength scores, read scientific papers to figure out what the right way to do strength scores by body part is, do a human body diagram so you can just show which muscles are bigger, which are smaller, connect to Apple Health to do my heart rate stuff. So I didn't put all of this in one prompt, but I put a lot of it in one prompt, and I immediately got a working app delivered to my personal app store. By the way, the personal app store is a little bit of a joke. It's real in the sense that it's my personal app store. It looks like an app store and my apps get delivered into it. But obviously, it's not for wide distribution because Apple gets that. Apple will not let you build apps that can be downloaded in anyone's iPhone. You have to key them against your specific devices. So with my friends and family, I can deliver them apps. I can't yet deliver them to everybody.