AI Now Builds Your Apps and Does Your Work: The "Vibe Coding" Revolution
Plus UAE's $20B bet, Microsoft's agent store and a weekend video from Luka
I didn’t make it to the Bitcoin conference again this year. Next year!
To the moon.
I’ve spent this past week testing updated and new tools from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4. I must have watch 20 hours of you tube videos this week on learning various hacks and developing some original ideas of our own. I fell in love, again, with … “discover source” on Notebook LM. I know. I promise I’ll get out more!
The Rundown Team are becoming become ‘tool ninjas’, testing and learning how tools can be integrated into productive workflows for:
Corporate comms teams
Newsrooms
Creatives
Our efforts at AI literacy in emerging markets continue. We will share insights from our tool shed and offer some analysis. We will continue to build our own products for comms teams like Pressmate, Pitchmate, Storymate, and Mediamate. We intend to build them into agentic workflows.
We also insist on having fun! Below is a video of the President of The Rundown Studio, Luka.
Flow, Veo 3 By Google
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‘Vibe Coding’ is Making Anyone a Developer
"I have a great idea but can't afford developers"… Sound familiar? This problem might be disappearing before our eyes.
There's a new term called "vibe coding" where people are using AI chatbots to write software without knowing how to code. The term comes from Andrej Karpathy, and it basically means people are trusting AI-generated code without checking every single line. With models getting more accurate and more powerful on coding, it’s opening up new opportunities.
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A full stack app consists of a front-end code (UI), backend (API) calls, database, integration and storage. If you have a business idea and you are looking to sell software or a product this is what you want which means in addition to the list of things above, there are two other important ingredients of full stack apps — Authentication and Payment integration. Finally, once the app is made, you want to deploy it to a server so that users can access them from a URL.
Traditionally, building a full stack app required teams of people and took months, if not years to build. Today, believe if or not, you can build a full stack app in a day with just you sitting in front of a computer - Madhukar Kumar
Read more here to get more context on building full-stack apps and what tools you can use.
Think about what this means for entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Instead of needing expensive tech teams or spending months learning to code, you could potentially build and launch a product in days. Professional developers roles could evolve into managing AI agents instead of writing code line by line. GitHub's CEO thinks developers will evolve, not disappear, and will focus on higher-level strategy while AI handles the grunt work.
Image from Gemini Studio
Chloe Samaha, a 21-year-old entrepreneur, built her entire startup's product in less than a day. Her partner cranked out the backend during a ski trip in six hours, she built the frontend in an hour and a half, and boom - they had a working productivity app called "Donna." They just landed $500,000 from venture capital firm and tech incubator Y Combinator for it.
Y Combinator's Tom Blomfield tried it out and built a 30,000-line recipe website in 100 hours, something that would have taken him a year the old way.
UAE Gave Everyone Free ChatGPT Plus
The UAE just did something no country has ever done - they're giving every single resident free access to ChatGPT Plus. That’s millions of people getting the premium AI service for free. This isn't just about free subscriptions though. They're building something called "Stargate UAE" in Abu Dhabi, a massive AI supercomputer that'll be one of the biggest in the world. The whole project involves Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, and a UAE company called G42, with total spending potentially hitting $20 billion split between the UAE and US.
It's basically one of the most all-in moves any government has made. It shows what's possible when a government fully commits to AI transformation, but it also highlights just how much money and infrastructure you need to compete at this level.
Perplexity Labs Now Does Your Work, Not Just Research
Perplexity just launched something called "Labs". Instead of just answering your questions, it actually completes entire projects for you. It covers a lot of needs, whether that be creating reports, building spreadsheets, making dashboards, or even simple websites - all in about 10 minutes of automated work.
If you need a marketing campaign analysis, Labs doesn't just give you information about marketing trends. It builds you an actual campaign with data, creates the materials, and puts together an interactive dashboard you can use. Same thing for financial analysis, business research, even creative projects like film concepts with full storyboards.
Perplexity’s new agent can spin up reports, dashboards, and more: Perplexity Pro subscribers can now try Perplexity Labs, which infuses the search engine with new agentic capabilities. Compared to the three-minute limit for Perplexity’s Research mode, Labs can go for 10 minutes at a time. In one example, when asked to create a stock trading strategy, the tool gathered all the data and then generated a dashboard packed with charts, diagrams, and recommendations - Superhuman
The difference between this and regular Perplexity search is huge. The old version gave you comprehensive answers in 3-4 minutes. Labs spends way more time and uses advanced tools to create finished deliverables you can actually use. This could be transformative. Instead of spending days researching and creating campaign materials, Labs could handle the heavy lifting while you focus on strategy and client relationships.
The New York Times x Amazon
The NYT is teaming up with Amazon to bring its stories to Alexa, marking the paper’s first AI collaboration. These kinds of deals happen all the time, but this one is notable because the New York Times has historically been pretty hostile to AI companies — its ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could even decide the fate of how startups train their models. The licensing announcement shows that AI really is going mainstream, with even the nation’s newspaper of record jumping on the bandwagon - Superhuman
Grok x Telegram Integration Deal
Meanwhile, xAI made a $300 million deal with Telegram to integrate Grok across the entire platform. Telegram gets 50% of subscription revenue, and Grok gets access to Telegram's massive global user base. That's one of the biggest AI integration deals we've seen.
All this suggests voice interfaces are moving from novelty to necessity in 2025. For markets where literacy rates vary or where people prefer voice communication, these advances could make AI way more accessible.
Anthropic CEO: Warning, AI is advancing faster than anyone imagine
A great summary below from
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just went on live TV and dropped a chilling warning: AI is advancing faster than anyone imagined — and it’s about to wipe out millions of jobs.
Amodei said AI could take away half of the starting office jobs in five years, which might make unemployment rise to 20%. AI could also start writing 90% of computer code in just six months and affect jobs in areas like finance, law, and consulting, especially for beginners.
Let’s look at how likely this is. AI is already good at doing things like writing code, analyzing data, and making documents, which are big parts of office work. A 2023 study by McKinsey said 30% of office tasks might be done by AI by 2030, but Amodei thinks it’ll be faster—50% of starting jobs gone by 2030.
For bigger office jobs, like mid-level lawyers or accountants, the changes might take longer—around 8 to 10 years, so by 2033-2035. These jobs need more complex thinking and personal connections, which AI can’t fully do yet. If AI improves at these harder tasks by 10% each year, there’s a 40-50% chance mid-level jobs will be affected by 2035.
Generated by Gemini Canvas
OpenAI's Secret Hardware Project with Apple's Former Design Guru
Jony Ive, the guy who designed the iPhone is now working with OpenAI on a mysterious AI device that's supposed to launch in late 2026. Details leaked from an internal OpenAI call. The device will be pocket-sized but not a phone, contextually aware of your surroundings, and completely screen-free. Sam Altman calls it a "third core device" something you'd put on your desk next to your laptop and phone. He's claiming it'll ship faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new.
What's intriguing is what it's NOT - it's not glasses, not something you wear on your body , and definitely not a phone. The whole concept is about getting people away from screens while still having AI that's fully aware of your life and environment. Altman thinks this $6.5 billion project could add $1 trillion to OpenAI's value. That's a massive bet on hardware being the future of AI interaction.
The big question for emerging markets is whether this will be another premium gadget for wealthy countries or if OpenAI's "democratizing AI" mission will extend to making it actually affordable globally.
Voice
Image from Gemini Studio
Voice interfaces are suddenly everywhere. Anthropic just rolled out voice mode for Claude. Claude's version lets you have full spoken conversations, switch between text and voice mid-chat, and choose from five different voices. The interesting part is how they're integrating with Google Workspace - paid users can talk to Claude and have it access their Calendar and Gmail. The idea is to make AI feel more like a personal assistant than a chatbot.
Telling voice models apart from real humans is about to get even harder: Resemble AI just released a no-cost, open-source model called Chatterbox that can clone any voice using just five seconds of audio, and users prefer it 63.75% of the time over ElevenLabs. (You can try it here.) But don’t count out Hume’s new EVI 3, which “stammers anxiously, debates enthusiastically, and whispers intimately,” making it sound convincingly human. The model is also much better at picking up on the emotions in your voice, and it’ll switch up how it responds depending on your mood. (Here’s a demo.) - From Superhuman
Microsoft's Agent Store
Microsoft just launched something called the Agent Store - basically an app store but for AI agents that can do specific work tasks. It's built into Microsoft 365, so these AI agents have access to your actual work data and can do real tasks, not just general chatbot stuff.
They started with over 70 agents, and developers can build new ones using Microsoft's tools. But here's what's really interesting - Microsoft is embedding something called Model Context Protocol directly into Windows. This means AI agents can actually install software, access your files, and interact with apps
AI's Economic Promise for Africa
Some positive news: Boye Ademola, CEO of Bazara technology, while speaking at Slush’D, Lagos AI said could contribute $2 trillion to Africa's economy by 2035. With Africa's combined GDP projected to reach $29 trillion by 2050, AI represents a significant growth opportunity.
However, Generative AI remains biased when creating African people due to lack of training data. This data gap must be addressed for AI to reach its full potential on the continent.
More Small Business Using AI for Comms & PR
That’s our sweet spot!
According to PR Daily, small businesses are increasingly shifting budgets toward AI and digital tools in 2025. Unlike 2023, when businesses focused on brand awareness and cautious experimentation, they're now investing in AI-powered content creation, predictive analytics, and performance-based automation.
The shift reflects a maturation in how businesses view AI - not as an experimental novelty but as an essential efficiency tool. You can read more about this here.
Of course if you are a small business you should consider using our product Pressmate, press releases made easy. We would love your participation in our beta.
Have a great weekend.
Zain