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When the iPhone first introduced apps in 2008, a feverish gold rush followed. New APIs and design standards made it easier to make softwareeven by non-coders. The question became: Could you create a small experience, perhaps something as simple as a fart button app, that could make you a million dollars in a weekend? (And while some people definitely cashed in, a majority of us did not.) Nearly two decades later, the rest of us have another opportunity to rethink mobile software. Weve entered the era of vibe codingin which complex software can be generated with nothing but plain language prompts. Now, rather than offer developers the tools to make the next hit app, it seems phone manufacturers may urge everyone to vibe-code their next widget. The hypebeasty smartphone company Nothing Technology has launched what its calling Essential Apps in beta on its website. What that really means is that, for the first time, you can simply describe the widget youd like to have (maybe the latest scores from your favorite team, or a slideshow of beautiful public domain imagery), and it will become a widget that you can download right to your phone, or even share with the public. Nothings mantra? One billion apps for one billion people. I still prefer the term widgets for what Nothing is sharing, but Ill admit that its a good line. Because it seems quite feasible that, for many of us, our first experience with vibe coding will actually be a widget. The rise of widgets Full-blown apps have been the main modality of smartphones since the early days of the App Store. But the industry has embraced widgets for nearly as longas lighter-weight, glanceable apps that are always open on your screen. Desktop computers had used widgets for years before Google introduced them to Android in 2009. Apple held out until 2014. While theyve always represented a strange mortar of our digital lives, widgets have remained an established part of our app lexicon as bite-size vessels for information that can live wherever you want on your phone. Vibe coding is amazing, but its still involved in building something as complex as a modern app. Widgets, on the other hand, have such a limited scope that they seem perfect for an inexperienced vibe coder. The information you want is the interface, and theres not a lot more to it. Nothing isnt technically the first company to come up with the idea of vibe-coding widgets on a mobile platform. You may have forgotten that this was also the biggest promise from Rabbit, the early AI hardware company that captured the tech worlds imagination in 2024before turning out to be less capable than promised. (Meanwhile, its founder, Jesse Lyu, is building a new piece of hardware completely dedicated to vibe coding that’s called the Cyberdeck.) Nothing has sold over 7 million devices to a loyal crowd that appreciates its quirkier, more expressive approach to design. Its phones have touches like its Glyph Button on the back, which can contain cute micrographics that evoke the Atari era. [Photo: Nothing] As it turns out, Nothings vibe coding supports new animations for this buttonand people have already generated music visualizers and timers. Other early works you can find from Nothing vibe coderswhich, for now, seem to be Nothings own employeesinclude tic-tac-toe and phases of the moon. Theyre also letting people generate and share custom music equalizers and photo slideshows. Two different early hands-ons both suggest Nothings vibe coding isnt as perfectly automated as we may imagine, but the modality seems promising all the same. While I dont believe every human on earth is capable of developing the next Uber by vibe coding, its easy to imagine myriad people having a tiny, very specific problem related to their commutes, or a transportation challenge that theyd love to solve. And vibe-coded widgets offer a reasonable container for those solutions. This is only the beginning This is all to say that while Nothing was first(ish) out of the gate, I suspect vibe-coded widgets are going to be an extraordinarily popular modality sold by phone manfacturers. And not even necessarily because people need or want them, but because their limited scope seems just right for welcoming the masses into a cutting-edge behavior. Samsung, for instance, is already trying to distinguish its platform with AI integration of all types. Google, a global leader in all things AI at this moment, is almost certainly working on tools like this. On our December By Design podcast, former Fast Company design editorand current Google senior staff designer working on Android AICliff Kuang suggested vibe coding would be the biggest paradigm for the next decade or even century. Even Apple, a company I would naturally assume would never touch vibe coding, may come to surprise us. Consider that its already embraced generative AI in Messages and other apps, and it just signed a deal to source its next AI model from Google. I could certainly imagine Apple, working with its collection of internally designed components, creating a widget customizer for its users. And of course, we cannot count out Chinese companies, which produce around 50% of smartphones globally. Huawei, in particular, already offers a variety of Service Cardsan evolution of the widget that can turn an app into a little card, complete with the apps core functions, right on the home screen. Why couldnt AI make the perfect intermediary here, for a user to customize exactly what they want to surface from an app? Im not saying that vibe-coded widgets will become the predominant way we interact with our smartphones. As few as 15% of Apple users report actively using them today. But I do believe that a combination of feasible scope and FOMO-driven strategy could drive the entire smartphone industry in this direction over the next year or two. In other words: If you havent delved into vibe coding yet, dont be surprised if your first project is a widget.
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E-Commerce
Need some recipe inspo for dinners this week? Look no further than the latest viral food trend on TikTok: boy kibble. The gym bros answer to girl dinner, which gained traction online in 2023 as an artfully arranged snack plate, boy kibble is consumed mainly by men trying to hit their protein goals while keeping calories low. Its 8PM and Im rawdogging some 93/7 ground beef, one enthusiast posted on TikTok. Were not the same. @thequadfather03 #boykibble #girldinner #fyp original sound – thequadfather03 In an era of strange diets (see meatfluencers scarfing down whole sticks of butter and wellness warriors championing E. coliriddled raw milk) a meal that consists largely of rice, minced meat, and perhaps a handful of vegetables isnt particularly shocking. Minor details like flavor matter less than how quickly and efficiently macros can be consumed. Here, food is simply fuel. A profile of the typical boy kibble consumer has emerged. Social media suggests these men are often corporate workers, the kind who also order a slop bowl for lunch from Cava or Sweetgreen. That said, some are pushing back on the stereotype. Making boy kibble in a girl-dinner-trying-to-add-protein-to-my-meal way, not a scary-villainous-bro way, one creator posted. The viral food trend has also been referred to as human kibble online, with women spotted eating it too. Substitute the ground beef for tofu and I feel horribly seen. Still, scrolling social media, it appears to skew male. @reginmantuano making boy kibble and i genuinely hit a bro state original sound – sunshinebenzi The act of cooking and consuming boy kibble is now known as ground beef oclock. One viral video shows two men in stacked apartment windows, both simultaneously pan-frying what we can only assume is ground beef. Boyhood, the caption reads. @cpla20 Boyhood original sound – NickiMVerses – Running home for ground beef oclock reads another video’s caption. In the clip, a man maintains a vice grip on his pack of beef while striding purposefully back to his apartment. @daniellafernandareyes he saw that 93/7 on sale #fypviral #fyp #newyork #nyc #financebro – Still, many people can relate to the feeling that coming up with a meal that sits within the Venn diagram of healthy, easy, and delicious every night for the rest of our lives can feel overwhelming. It may be part of why a recent viral New York Times article about Americans DoorDash habits struck a nerve. Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse, one X user wrote. I am Gods worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say I dont cook I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice. Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse I am Gods worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say I dont cook I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice. Youre telling me a large number of people cant even do that pic.twitter.com/mr3H9nTaWW— Charlotte Lee (@cljack) February 2, 2026 In that context, boy kibble isnt a sign of grindset optimization maxxing. Instead, its a simple, nutritious, and affordable way for burned-out workers to take one responsibility off their plates.
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E-Commerce
On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier. Later, you interview a job candidate via Zoom, but the person looks different from his LinkedIn picture. Any or all of these thingsthe video, the song, the email, the CEOs app, the candidatecould have been generated by AI tools or agents. But our epistemic defaults, I’d argue, are still set to assume these things are human-created unless available information proves otherwise. We have not yet entered a zero-trust paradigm where content is generated unless proven authentic. Instead, we find ourselves in an anxious middle ground. The question now arises whenever we encounter a new image, video, or piece of information: Is this AI-generated? Increasingly, the answer will be yes. We are close enough to that zero-trust reality that we can see it approaching on the horizon. Beyond deepfakes Deepfakes were just the beginning. AI-generated video designed to mislead or incite was, not so long ago, seen as a novelty. Now its common in everything from revenge porn to politics. AI-generated music has gone mainstream. Last year, a fully generated country song called Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in the U.S. An AI-generated TV ad, made with Googles Veo 3, Gemini, and ChatGPT, ran during Game 3 of the NBA Finals last year. According to a Gallup Q3 2025 report, 45% of U.S. employees now use AI at work. In a similar vein, the email deliverability firm ZeroBounce found in a September 2025 survey that one in four workers use AI daily to draft emails, and that number has likely increased. The same survey found that a quarter of workers suspect their performance review was written using AI. By most accounts, the use of AI agents in corporate workflows is still in the early innings. But AI companies say were moving toward a future in which agents from different departments collaborate to complete back-office tasks, such as compensating suppliers, or to compile decision-support materials, like a business case for entering a new market or making an acquisition. Its already likely that AI agents, including deep research or business intelligence tools, play some role in assembling reports managers receive at work. Amazons AWS says its customers have used AI agents to save more than 1 million hours of manual effort. McKinsey predicts that by 2030 the use of agents and robots could create about $2.9 trillion in value in the U.S. if organizations redesign their workflows for people, agents, and robots working together. (Of course, McKinsey wants to help them do that.) Depending on her technical savvy, the CEO mentioned above may have mocked up a new app using Replit or Bolt. These so-called vibe-coding tools can generate a credible proof of concept in a weekend. She may then have handed it off to software engineering, whose developers might use Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to turn the idea into a production-ready app that connects to company databases and third-party tools. A late-2025 Stack Overflow study claims that about 84% of developers now use, or plan to use, AI coding tools, with roughly half already using them daily. When applying for remote jobs, more candidates are trying to improve their odds with AI tools that enhance their face or voice or generate answers in real time during interviews. The voice authentication firm Pindrop says that in its own video interviews it regularly encounters applicants using deepfake software and other generative AI tools to try to land a job. Gartner predicts that by 2028 a quarter of all remote applicants will be AI-generated. Deepfakes once threatened to distort reality; now the distortion is structural, embedded in the systems that produce culture, manage companies, and decide who gets hired. AI, weaponized But the scammer may have a different goal in mind, and this points to scenarios where generative AI tools arent just used as timesavers, but as weapons. AI can help conceal the real identities of job applicants who are trying to extract sensitive company information or, worse, secure a role in order to install ransomware. Scammers are also increasingly using advanced face- and voice-swapping tools for outright fraud. In 2024, a team of scammers posed as top executives of the engineering firm Arup during a video call using sophisticated AI tools. They tricked a finance employee into sending them $25 million. We sense that our epistemic defaultsour AI slop detectors, if you willmay lag behind what technology can already do. And that suspicion is correct. The holy-shit moments accompanying new AI breakthroughs now arrive with striking regularity. Recently, some users and journalists concluded that the OpenClaw agent platform had become sentient after watching agents complete tasks independently, deploy humans to finish assignments, and then gather in their own online forum to discuss it. At the same time, many ChatGPT users are grieving the forthcoming loss of GPT-4o because they developed a personal attachment to the model. New Chinese video generation systems such as ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 are producing highly controllable video thats increasingly difficult to distinguish from footage captured by a camera. The next tech wave Social networks, in many ways, act as intermediariesproviding a wide-angle lens through which a person sees the world. To increase engagement and ad views, Facebook distorted that lens, to the detriment of both democracy and children. This week, Facebook-parent Meta is defending itself in a Los Angeles courtroom after years of deploying design features, including endless scroll, that critics say proved harmfuly addictive for younger users. That was the last tech revolution, and it depended on user-made content. But with AI, the web can generate its own content on demand. This may put an immense amount of power in the hands of a few AI companies, perhaps even more so than was given to social media companies. With so much money and influence at stake, the question is whether AI companies will do what firms like Meta did not and draw a clear line between human-created and machine-generated content. I seriously doubt it, especially with a billionaire class and a Trump administration doing everything possible to stifle legislation that might protect AI consumers. If thats the case, then maybe taking a zero-trust approach to everything that appears on our screens is the only rational path forward.
Category:
E-Commerce
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