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Vibecore: the economics of authenticity - by Tina He

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There’s a new crop of companies emerging. VibeGrade for grading, VibeCode, VibeMarketing, and surely soon VibeTrade or VibeWrite, each claiming to distill the mess and mystery of human work into a set of algorithmic instructions. Each taps into our growing addiction: automating daily complexity through our most subjective sensibility—the "vibe." But you can’t automate the ineffable if you never bothered to access or even define what the ineffable looks like. No algorithm can fetch your “vibe” from ‘Source’, much less train on it, if you don’t have one. Before you can offload discernment, you have to possess some discernment worth offloading. In 2025, “vibe” is no longer just a whiff of coolness or a fleeting energy in the room—it’s a currency, a badge, a product to be refined, packaged, ranked, and circulated. The industrialization of vibe is not speculative. It's happening in real time. But what exactly do we mean by “vibe” in this context? The word carries the weight of ancient intui

There’s a new crop of companies emerging. VibeGrade for grading, VibeCode, VibeMarketing, and surely soon VibeTrade or VibeWrite, each claiming to distill the mess and mystery of human work into a set of algorithmic instructions. Each taps into our growing addiction: automating daily complexity through our most subjective sensibility—the "vibe." But you can’t automate the ineffable if you never bothered to access or even define what the ineffable looks like. No algorithm can fetch your “vibe” from ‘Source’, much less train on it, if you don’t have one. Before you can offload discernment,…

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