Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Tuesday 5th May 2026

(The scene opens on a dimly lit stage. ALFIE SWEARY stomps out, wearing a suit two sizes too small, sweating profusely. He is shouting.)

ALFIE SWEARY: ALRIGHT! SETTLE DOWN, YOU BUNCH OF SYCOPHANTIC MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT YOGURT-KNITTERS!

I’ve just been reading LinkedIn. Or as I call it, “The Digital Dementors’ Circle Jerk.” And I came across a post by a man called Barnaby Muck. A “Business Futurist.” What a job that is, eh? “Business Futurist.” It’s what you tell the police you are when they find you lurking outside a Dixon’s at 3 AM with a soldering iron and a look of existential dread!

He’s written a piece about “Vibe Coders.” VIBE CODERS! (He begins to dance a heavy, rhythmic jig). “I’m coding by vibes, Alfie! I don’t know what a semicolon is, but I’ve got a really positive aura around this Python script! It’s not working, but the feng shui of the error message is absolutely top-notch!”

(Suddenly, the energy shifts. He adopts the slouching, exasperated, slightly academic tone of MARCUS IRON.)

MARCUS IRON: But you see, this is the thing, isn’t it? This is the world we live in now. Barnaby, who I imagine spends his entire life standing in front of a green screen of a floating brain, has realised that there are people now using AI to write code who have absolutely no idea how code works. And he calls them “Vibe Coders.”

Which is brilliant, isn’t it? It’s so… modern. It’s like saying, “I’ve decided to become a Vibe Surgeon.” I don’t actually know where the spleen is, and I’ve never seen a scalpel, but I’m going to stand over your open chest cavity and just… will the tumor to leave by the power of Lo-Fi Hip Hop beats and a subscription to ChatGPT Plus.

And Barnaby’s big, revolutionary insight, the thing he’s been paid the GDP of a small Caribbean island to tell us, is that these people still need to think like engineers. Well, fuck me, Muck! Give this man a Nobel Prise! It’s like a “Vibe Pilot” being told by a “Aviation Futurist” that, while it’s lovely he’s feeling very “blue-sky” about the flight, he might still want to occasionally check if the wings are still attached to the fuselage!

(He pauses, stares blankly at the audience for an uncomfortably long time, then begins to pace slowly, head down, in the style of STUART MEADOW.)

STUART MEADOW: And you look at Barnaby Muck… and you see the… the purity… of the grift. Because what Barnaby is doing… in his LinkedIn post… which has been liked by three thousand people called “Head of People Operations” at firms that manufacture… plastic spacers for curtain rails… what he’s doing is… he’s taking the obvious… and he’s… he’s re-packaging it… as a “strategic imperative.”

(He sighs heavily, looking disgusted.)

I saw a Vibe Coder in a coffee shop in East London. He was wearing a beanie hat in July. And he was “vibe-coding.” He was typing “Make me an app that’s like Uber but for artisanal moss” into a prompt box. And Barnaby Muck… Barnaby Muck, the High Priest of the Obvious… he says to this boy… he says… “You must maintain architectural integrity.”

“Architectural integrity.”

It’s just words, isn’t it? It’s just… noise. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a corporate away-day where you’re forced to build a bridge out of dried pasta and then wonder why your pension fund has collapsed.

(He leans in close to the microphone, whispering.)

But Barnaby knows. Barnaby knows that if he just keeps using words like “paradigm,” and “generative,” and “ecosystem,” the technology court jesters will keep tossing him gold coins. He’s the man who tells the King the new clothes are lovely, while simultaneously charging the King for a PDF guide on “How to Wear Invisible Trousers in the Digital Age.”

(Back to ALFIE SWEARY, screaming.)

IT’S ALL BOLLOCKS! IT’S BULLSHIT! He’s a technology court jester! He’s the man who would watch the Hindenburg go up in flames and say, “Well, from a Vibe Perspective, the thermal energy is really disrupting the hydrogen sector!”

(He starts marching.)

“Why Vibe Coders Still Need to Think Like Software Engineers.” Why do they? Because if they don’t, the whole world falls over, Barnaby! That’s not a “thought leadership” piece! That’s a cry for help from a civilisation that has replaced actual knowledge with a series of slickly-produced infographics about things that don’t exist!

He’s a grifter! A shiny, polyester-clad, AI-generated grifter! If you fed a thousand LinkedIn posts into a woodchipper and then asked a lobotomised parrot to summarise the remains, you’d get Barnaby Muck’s career!

(He stops, panting, and looks at the audience with pure contempt.)

Now get out. Go on. Go and “vibe” with some middleware. I’ve got a pork pie in the dressing room that has more “thought leadership” in its crust than Barnaby Muck has in his entire cloud-based repository!

(Blackout.)