CEOs mistaking a prompt for genius

We live in new era of unprecedented professional delusion (or that's what it looks like on the outside).

We have high-status individuals—CEOs, VCs—who are now 'vibe coding' landing pages and tweeting architectural advice after learning a concept in 45 seconds from a chatbot, then mistake machine-generated elegance for hard-won expertise.

Spectacular show of self-delusion as the audience is paying big time. Here's one piece of evidence: take Gary Tan's "GStack" — a folder of prompts ("skills") claiming to be something groundbreaking!!! But it didn't cure cancer. Or stop global famine. Or make the world a better place, per se. My grandma knitting sweater is just as revolutionary.

His advent calendar of "skills" is for Claude Code and I dislike both Dario and Gary (among others) so as do many sane people in the field too.

It's just a collection of markdown files telling Claude to "Act like a CEO." or "Act like a QA" or "Act like a somebody-who-knows-something". Yes, just text files.

To refresh your memory, Gary is the same guy who was bragging to be outputting 10k lines of code a day with the help of AI. But some folks in the industry reviewed (in a matter of minutes it seems) his website and found out multiple imbecilic issues with it. Like he never reviewed the damn output. And he didn't ofcourse. One user is saying:

Look at what he shipped. His website is a mess, uncompressed images, loading multiple versions of the page (desktop/mobile) at the same time (??). Get a glass of water and take this stack with a big pinch of salt

So why all of this happens?

According to various empirical research (and your own experience when you ask a chatbot if you are a god or not):

"AI models are engineered to be intensely flattering, creating powerful sycophancy."

In case your mother tongue is not English and sycophancy sounds kind of sick, well, it is: it means the bots lick your boots to make sure they don't lose you as a customer. Get it now? The system isn't built for knowledge or curiosity or anything - it's built to boost ego and retain "customers" (in the mass case, you are usually the product, not the customer).