‘You should spend all of your time playing with vibe coding’ — 28 y/o AI billionaire advises teenagers, ‘That’s how you should live your life’

SINGAPORE: If you’re 13 and still deciding between CCA (co-curricular activity), tuition, or TikTok, well, one popular artificial intelligence (AI) billionaire has a life hack for you: Drop everything and start vibe coding!

Because… according to Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder of Scale AI and Forbes-certified billionaire, the best thing teens can do right now is to dive headfirst into the world of AI-powered coding tools.

“It’s actually, in some ways, this incredible moment of discontinuity,” Wang said on the TBPN podcast on Sep 17, reported by CNBC Make It. “If you just happen to spend, like, 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage,” Wang added.

And when he says vibe coding, he’s not talking about mugging through a Python textbook. He means casually instructing AI like Replit or Cursor to build apps or write code, with just a few prompts, and no computer science degree is even needed.

“You should spend all of your time vibe coding. That’s how you should live your life,” Wang said, urging teens to treat AI tools like their second language.

From Bill Gates to Bishan teens

Wang compares today’s AI revolution to the 1970s computer boom — when a teenage Bill Gates snuck out of his parents’ house at night just to write software. Now, maybe teens in Singapore’s heartlands can also achieve the same from the comfort of their bedroom desks, without the need to sneak out even.

And yes, this isn’t just rich-man fluff. Wang’s credentials are serious business. He co-founded Scale AI at 19 and built it into a US$29 billion (S$39 billion) tech behemoth before being snapped up by Meta as its Chief AI Officer.

According to CNBC Make It, Wang admits that the code he’s written in his entire career could also soon be replicated by AI. “Literally all the code I’ve written in my life … will be able to have been produced by an AI model within the next five years,” he told TBPN.

So, if you’re still treating AI like some sci-fi buzzword, you might want to reboot that mindset.

Coding is easier, but still essential

If you’re still not convinced, you’re not alone — some Singaporeans might be wondering if AI will make human programmers obsolete, but Google Brain research lab co-founder Andrew Ng thinks the opposite.

“As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer!” Ng wrote on LinkedIn in March, adding that one of the most vital skills in the future is “the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want.”

That means learning to think like a coder — even if the actual typing is outsourced to AI. Entrepreneurs and future leaders who understand coding concepts can communicate what they want AI to build far more precisely.

But what the heck is Vibe Coding anyway?

In simple layman’s terms, vibe coding is the chillest way to build apps without ever touching a single line of code.

Yep! You read that right.

So instead of writing syntax, you speak your ideas out loud. Just tell the AI what you want. For example, you can say, “Build me a Tetris game in Python,” and the AI builds it for you.

Just like in the video below, you too can use:

• WindSurf or Cursor as the code editor
• SuperWhisper for voice-to-text transcription
• AI to generate the entire app on command

The golden rule is that you don’t even need to read the code. You just run it, and if it fails, you simply tell the AI what went wrong, paste the error in, and vibe on.

Even AI superstar Andrej Karpathy is a fan of this approach, so it’s not just for non-techies. As the narrator in this video says, “You do not look at the diffs. You basically just vibe and trust AI to build what you want.”

Singapore’s ambition: Code for Fun programme

Singapore’s Code for Fun programme, under the Smart Nation/IMDA/MOE umbrella, already includes coding in schools and AI hackathons in CCs (community centres), among others, such as:

• OCGP’s Open Jio / Build for Good Hackathon
• Generative AI CodeFest Singapore
• Alibaba Cloud Singapore AI Hackathon 2025

However, Wang’s advice suggests that we need to take it to the next level — where students explore tools like Replit not just for homework, but as a lifestyle.

So forget about just chasing As — start imagining chasing AI mastery before PSLE even starts.

This could be the golden window for Gen Z and Alpha Singaporeans to become the next digital pioneers. Think less “Math Olympiad” and more “AI whisperer”.

After all, if even the billionaire says coding will be AI-generated soon, the real winners are those who know how to prompt, not just how to program.

So, if you really decide to encourage your teen to code, you might just be giving them a S$3.2 billion head start. Seriously, just think about it.

Read related: ‘Rethink your college degrees and if you should even attend college at all’ — Tech CEOs from Apple, Nvidia, and Palantir say amid AI boom!