Fork the Tao

To Rick Rubin and his collaborators at Anthropic on their project, The Way of the Code—I have a pull request.

This essay is written in response to the beautiful and strange artwork that is The Way of the Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding. There is so much I love about the project, and I want to begin there. But I also have a few questions—and some thoughts on how it could become even more profound. While these reflections are addressed to Rick Rubin and the folks at Anthropic, they are also meant for the broader community I have been connecting with—educators, scholars, learning designers, and students—some of whom who have, like me, begun to experiment with vibe coding to build digital artifacts well beyond our technical capacities and who are feeling, like me, (insert full gamut of human emotion here) about AI and its widening entanglements with our lives, cultures, ecologies, and creative practices.

But before getting to all that, we need a quick rundown on some terminology and who Rick Rubin is, in order to fully appreciate the unlikely weirdness of this conversation.

A Brief Recap

Rick Rubin is a wildly influential record producer, a legendary figure whose creative fingerprints are found across multiple genres and decades: LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Lady Gaga, Metallica, The Cult, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, Kid Rock—the list is staggering. What makes this legend all the more fascinating is that Rick, famously, has said, “I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music.” He doesn’t play an instrument or operate the console. He could be described as a vibes-based producer. All intention, feels, and cool.

Rick also has an incredible look, which—superficial as it may seem—is very much part of this story. With his long, kinetic beard and ratty coils and wisps of hair, he has the aesthetic of a mystic or cult leader (see my post on the fiction of faces). He is also staunchly analogue: "I can barely get my computer to turn on," he says. "I am not technical in any way. I have no coding skills. I really have a hard time getting the equipment to work."

Recently, a photograph of Rick began circulating through the unfathomable tides of internet fancy. In the image—taken at a high-fidelity audio convention in Munich—he is listening to music through high-end headphones. The mouse he’s holding controls the volume. In the image, his eyes are closed. His expression is of deep, inward attention. He appears to be in communion with something deeply profound.

The image struck a chord and took on a life of its own. It became a meme. The meme of vibe coding.

“Vibe coding” is a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in a post on X in February 2025. It refers to the process of building coded things without writing a line of code. You simply describe to a large language model what you want to happen, and it happens! The only thing you really need is an idea and a little time. I have personally made things I have no business making—and they work. Interactive artifacts, apps that automate tedious tasks, beautifully formatted digital environments. All by articulating the features of the thing I want to build. In the process of vibe coding, the thing you think you want changes in relation to what is happening. It really is astonishing. And it does feel as if I am the author/creator of these things I have made. There’s no lingering sense that I’ve cheated or bypassed something essential. I envision and articulate; the LLM executes.

“There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding" [writes Karpathy] where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists…. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

Back to Rick, the face of vibe coding.

Rick had never heard of vibe coding. He had no idea what it meant. He found the whole thing amusing, but was also receptive to the absurdity. The internet had chosen him. As he put it in an interview on The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News: "It was as if the hive mind selected me to be a part of this story."

Intrigued, Rick began exploring the concept and found that it resonated very much with his own creative process. Vibe coding is about creating through attunement and intention rather than through knowledge or expertise. It’s a process of feeling rather than control, of opening up to the contingencies of the moment, collaborating with the model and the universe, noticing and nudging a thing into being. This was very much aligned with his own creative process. After all, he said, "I'm the record producer who doesn't know anything about music. The idea that there could be a coder who doesn't know anything about coding—it makes sense."

Rick had already written a book on creativity, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, which I haven’t read, but understand to be energized by a Buddhist sense of spiritual receptivity and collaboration with the world in the creative process. So, in collaboration with the strange contingencies of his own memification, Rick began to think about writing a book on vibe coding. He found the idea humorous—to write The Book on the timeless art of a very recent practice, and one he had never actually tried himself.

As he explored the idea of vibe coding, he began to notice resonances with the ancient spiritual wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, a Chinese text that holds a central place in his creative and spiritual world. It is a wellspring of his vibes-based approach to making art. And so the concept was born. Drawing on various translations of the Tao, consulting multiple AI platforms, and working in collaboration with Anthropic, Rubin wrote The Way of the Code—a poetic, animated, interactive reimagining of the Tao, refracted through the language of coding and the art of computation.

As he described it, The Way of the Code “started as a joke—somebody writing a book about something that they don't know what it is. What would that be like?"

The answer, it turns out, is both beautiful and troubling in the way that AI itself is beautiful and troubling.

Each chapter of the text closely mirrors the structure of the Tao and is paired with an animated illustration that figures the theme of the verse. The illustrations have a minimalist, elemental quality—sheets, orbs, planes, and shapes that evoke a poetics of code, where forms flow and logic morphs in gorgeous and subtle permutations. Each visual is also a prompt and invitation. Click on ‘Modify,’ and the code opens in a new window of Claude, where you can vibe with it however you wish. Readers are invited to interact with and re-author the artwork: “Make it more vibrant.” “Add momentum.” “What if it shimmered like water?”

What I love about The Way

I love the layers of narrative at work in this project: that Rick became a meme and decided to go with it; that he had the chutzpah to rewrite the Tao and put his name on it! The blasphemy of the whole goddamned thing delights me. I call on Haraway (1991) and her Cyborg Manifesto—which, frankly, should be required reading alongside The Way of the Code—to stand with me here. I could not agree more: blasphemy and humour are vital modes for thinking through our messy entanglements with technology.

“Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously,” she writes. “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play” (p. 150).

The Way of the Code, is serious play. The artworks are genuinely beautiful, and I accepted the invitation to play with them— iterating, reimagining, and vibing with them in my own conversations with Claude.

There is undeniable wisdom in this text, which describes vibe coding as a creative process that draws from the wellspring of all creativity - the Source. Code in The Way, is not just programming, but pattern, structure, the logic of the universe. The Vibe Coder taps into this logic. This is about creation and becoming, it’s about relinquishing control and opening up to the movement of planets.

The animations are visualizations of code’s potential: delicate, webbed interfaces that breathe and morph, illustrating the poetics and aesthetics of computational space.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the Vibe Coder is building. Maybe it’s an app to track fantasy football scores. Maybe it’s an interface to optimize ad delivery for a wellness brand. The Source moves through all things. That fundamental irony is part of what I love. The whole gesture of the book is both absurd and serious, holding “incompatible things together” in the same breath. After all, this Tao is an advertisement for the commercial product that is Claude.

What Troubles Me

The whole impetus for this essay began with the figure of the Vibe Coder himself. When I first engaged with The Way of the Code, I found myself genuinely moved—drawn in by its aesthetic, amused by its self-awareness, and intrigued by its philosophical overtones. But what repeatedly disrupted my suspension of disbelief was the gender of the central character: the resolute maleness of the archetype. While the Vibe Coder moves through a universe that is, like the original Tao, deeply feminine in tone and texture, The Way of the Code casts him unmistakably as a he—the subject, the centre, the Master. It pushed me out of the text.

I didn't recall feeling that way when reading Stephen Mitchell’s (1988) translation of the Tao Te Ching, which Rick names as a central inspiration, and cites on the first page of The Way. I went back to my copy to check. In Mitchell’s text, the Master is both she and he in equal measure. In the preface Mitchell explains:

"The Chinese language doesn’t make this kind of distinction; in English we have to choose. But since we are all, potentially, the Master… I felt it would be untrue to present a male archetype. Ironically, because of all the great world religions, the teaching of Lao-tzu is by far the most female."

Rubin’s choice not to follow Mitchell in this regard feels deliberate—especially against the backdrop of the persistent gender imbalance in the tech world, the broader discursive swing toward ‘traditional’ gender roles, the rise of the “Manosphere,” and an intensifying macho tone and “antiwoke tech bro” energy shaping Silicon Valley’s cultural aesthetics.

Still, I’d like to give Rubin the benefit of the doubt.

Rick describes the Tao as “open and poetic enough to allow the reader to truly participate in what the book is saying.” I love this description—it offers a way of reading The Way of the Code itself: as a product of Rubin’s deep, creative participation with the Tao. In open-source culture, creative works are shared and endlessly iterated upon. To “fork” something means to take an existing project and create a distinct version of it—part homage, part departure. With this project, Rubin and friends have forked the Tao.

While I personally found the male figure of the Vibe Coder to inhibit my own identification with the text, I began to wonder… maybe I want to fork the Tao too.

Who is the author of The Way of the Code anyway? Rubin is channeling the ancient text through this narrative, remixing it with the help of AI, and drawing resonances from his own spiritual and creative practice. Besides the fact that he is famous and makes this story interesting, why is he named while the creators of the artworks remain unnamed? Is Rubin the author or the meme? Why are the illustrations the only thing that can be publicly vibed?

On creativity and expertise

The Vibe Coder never reaches for the great. Thus, he achieves greatness.

There is something undeniably beautiful in the idea that creativity emerges not through control, but through surrender. It is presence, attention, noticing the creativity of the world as it happens— this is Vibing with Source. The Way of the Code leans into this sensibility. The less we interfere, the more authentic the outcome. The Vibe Coder achieves greatness precisely by not striving for it, not trying so hard. It suggests a kind of metaphysical determinism: if you are open enough, empty enough, the voice of the universe will write itself through you by way of the conduit. Claude. Built by Anthropic.

There is much to be said about the myth of tool neutrality—the idea that any technology (from a hammer to a chatbot) simply extends human intention, or acts as a pipeline through which meaning, thought, and purpose flow freely, without mediation. I’m not going to take up that robust critique here. “Tool” remains a useful metaphor, though it is only one among the expanding ecology of metaphors we need to make sense of AI.

I also kind of love the horror this project will likely provoke in some readers, precisely because it so unabashedly indulges the mythic logic of techno-spiritual ideology and the quasi-religious fervour of AI acceleration. It leans in—without apology—to the absurd sublime of the Silicon Valley imagination. Like the image of cloud computing: frictionless, floating, and utterly detached from the material realities of energy consumption, labour, and planetary entanglement.

Meeting this project where it is at, I do wonder if it lost its sense of humour.

The project begins in blasphemy, but ends in reverence. It offers the text as a complete work. It is finished. It is The Way. This Way is admittedly strange and beautiful. But I believe it needs to go even further. It plays with sacredness—let us play too. Let us all fork the Tao.

What if I could ask of it—just as we’re invited to do with the illustrations—Make it faster. Make it queer. Make the Vibe Coder a wounded animal. Rewrite the whole thing only with words that begin with the letter M.

This is what vibing coding is—it unsettles all boundaries. It opens things up. Anyone can make art, build a bomb, write the Tao. So let us vibe the text itself. Let us decompose and recode the poetry and discover for ourselves what is gained and lost in doing so. That’s my pull request for this project.

Let the Vibe Coder herself be vibed.
Let Rick Rubin the author come undone by a million conversations with Claude.
Let the Tao fork like a rhizome—branching endlessly in collaboration with the universe and paid subscribers.
Let the deep incompatibilities and blasphemies of this code show through.