Rick Rubin thinks AI has done for software what punk did for music. Mike Dean thinks that misses the point. Rubin’s line, from a 2025 appearance on a16z’s Ben & Marc Show: “vibe coding is the punk rock of coding.” Dean’s answer, left this week in a comment on an Instagram post: “There is no shortcut to real musicianship. Or to real studio skills.”
Rubin’s argument is about the door. Before punk, the way into music ran through the conservatory: years of study before you were fit to play in a symphony. Punk collapsed that. Learn three chords in an afternoon, start a band, and if you had something to say you were qualified to say it. He would know, because that is how he started. His claim is that AI does the same thing for making things, shifting the emphasis off technique and onto ideas.
The context is worth knowing. Rubin made the comment while promoting The Way of Code, an interactive digital book that reimagines the Tao Te Ching for the age of AI, built with Anthropic’s Claude. “Vibe coding,” the term at the center of the argument, was coined in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy: building software by describing what you want in plain language and accepting what comes back, rather than writing or fully understanding it yourself.
Dean, commenting from his verified account, was not persuaded. He left two replies, and the second was blunter than the first: “Must be a big ass check involved here.” It drew nearly three times the likes of the musicianship comment, which tells you something about where the room is sitting on this.
Here is the thing, though. They are not actually disagreeing. Rubin is talking about the floor, how easy it is to start. Dean is talking about the ceiling, how hard it is to be great. Punk proved both at once: it let everybody in, most of what came through the door was forgettable, and the great ones were great anyway. Three chords got a generation into a room. It did not make any of them The Clash.
The tools keep lowering the floor. The ceiling has not moved.
Watch the full conversation
Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software, via the Ben & Marc Show.
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