WE HAVE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE
A new medium arrives. It feels like liberation. It scales faster than anyone expects. It rewires the incentives of creators, platforms, and quietly, our brains. Then, years later, we look back and realise we did not just build tools. We built habits.
Right now, a new creative medium is landing with a force that is hard to describe unless you have felt it - vibe coding.
Not coding as we have known it - tickets, teams, backlogs, frameworks, meetings, compromises. But something closer to streaming consciousness into reality. You think it, you shape it, you ship it. And it can go live on the internet in the same breath.
That shift is spawning four trends that, together, point to a very different near-future of creativity, entertainment, and agency.Below is a briefing of what we are seeing, and the caution we cannot ignore.
TREND 1/ SYNTHETIC OMNIPOTENCE
Vibe coding triggers a specific kind of empowerment. Not "I made something," but "I can make anything."
It is world-building without friction - no waiting for a teammate, no production pipeline, no negotiation. Just intent-to-outcome. And unlike traditional world-building games, what you create is not trapped inside a sandbox. It can become real software, shared with real people, gathering real attention, generating real consequences.
That is the new feeling - creation with sovereignty.
It is intoxicating. It can also be destabilising. When you have tasted instant world-building, the slow, collaborative, compromise-heavy reality of most organisations starts to feel like moving through wet concrete. We are going to see new expectations form - not just about speed, but about control.
SIGNAL/ Creators begin to prefer tools that maximise agency over tools that maximise polish.
IMPACT/ The solo-builder era accelerates, and teams must re-justify their friction with actual value.
TREND 2/ PLAYABLE FEEDS
Social media has been an era of passive consumption - infinite feeds, idle scrolling, algorithmic mood shifts.
But the next entertainment primitive looks different - micro-interactivity.
Tiny playable experiences - generators, mini-games, simulations, remix toys, "try this" prompts - are more emotionally sticky than content you merely watch. And vibe coding collapses the cost of making them.
So the next breakout platform may not be a better feed. It may be a system that turns the feed into a distribution layer for executable posts:
1/ the post becomes a tiny app
2/ the share becomes an invitation to do
3/ the community becomes a loop of remixing and forking
SIGNAL/ content starts behaving like software
IMPACT/ creators who can ship interaction fast become the new influencers.
TREND 3/ AGENTS WITH HANDS. AND SHIELDS.
The leap from "chat with AI" to "AI that does" is the real inflection point.
Clawbot-style phenomena, and the security reactions around them, are early proof that the market is moving from LLMs-as-interfaces to LLMs-as-operators.
Once an agent can browse, run tools, authenticate into services, and execute actions, it becomes an actor in your digital life. And that immediately creates the next inevitable market - agent security and governance.
Think of it as the agent stack emerging in real time:
1/ operator agents
2/ skill and plugin ecosystems
3/ distribution - including agent-first networks
4/ runtime safety - including policy, sandboxing, and firewalls
5/ identity and auditability
We are watching the same pattern the internet went through - except faster, and with more stakes, because these systems do not just persuade. They act.
SIGNAL/ ecosystems form around skills, plugins, and automation.
IMPACT/ trust, permissions, and verification become product features, not compliance-afterthoughts.
TREND 4/ - THE DOPAMINE FOUNDRY
Here is the part we need to say out loud.
When we designed social media and the internet, we did not understand what it would do to our brains. We did not predict dopamine loops at planetary scale. We did not anticipate the downstream mental health effects - the attention erosion, the anxiety, the comparison engine, the ambient outrage.
Now we are building something that may be even more neurologically persuasive:
1/ creation that responds instantly
2/ entertainment that is interactive
3/ agents that adapt to you
4/ feedback loops that never sleep
Vibe coding can feel like creative flow - but also like compulsion. Micro-interactivity can feel like play - but also like a deeper hook than passive content. Agentic systems can feel like relief - but also like outsourcing parts of our thinking and decision-making.
At the collective level, the risk is not just distraction. It is a shift in what we expect reality to feel like:
1/ less tolerance for slowness
2/ less tolerance for ambiguity
3/ more craving for instant response
4/ more impatience with the human pace of life
The uncomfortable question - is it already too late?
Maybe for the first wave, yes. These tools are already out. The incentives are already running. But it is not too late to design the next wave with intention - constraints, friction where it protects humans, transparency, healthy defaults, and speed-limits on the most addictive loops.
We cannot pretend we do not know this time.
SIGNAL/ creator burnout, compulsion cycles, and "one more iteration" behaviour becomes mainstream.
IMPACT/ wellness-by-design becomes a differentiator, because parents, schools, and even enterprises will demand it.
SO WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS?
If you are building in this moment, you are not just shaping products. You are shaping cognition.
The opportunity is massive - a new creative economy, a new entertainment grammar, a new agentic infrastructure. But the responsibility is equally massive - these systems will change how humans relate to attention, effort, and agency.We do not need less ambition.
We need better defaults.
Not because we are afraid of the future - because we are building it.
WE'RE FINH
We build the future - carefully
If you are exploring agentic products, playable media, or AI-native creation tools and want to design them with craft and responsibility, we would love to talk.