#75 | Productive Laziness, Constructive Struggle, Debunking Frogs and Marshmallows

Benjamin Joffe

Jun 05, 2025

My irregular newsletter on work and play. Unsubscribe at the bottom. LinkedIn

Quick post before flying back from NY to Lisbon.

1. WORK

VC/Founders Virtual Matchmaking

The Health Tech Matchup has just been announced today and the first 100 registrations came in. We expect over 1,000 participants including 500+ investors. Register here.
Those events might sound like anecdotes, but they are the largest events of their kind, with unprecedented info about both startups and investors, and they are FREE!

2. VIBE CODING

The term “Vibe Coding” was coined 4 months ago, and my Vibe Coding Bootcamp launched 3 months ago on Udemy.

Here is what happened recently:

I came up with an acronym to describe AI benefits: BASE, for Building and Prototyping, Automating Repetitive Tasks, Speeding Up Execution, Enhancing Skills. It’s such a skill multiplier I worry for those who are exposed to disruptions and don’t get on board fast. Surf’s up!
I gave a talk on vibe coding followed by a panel with an experienced CTO discussing the benefits and limits. AI-assisted coding is here to stay, and vibe coding is democratizing access.
I ran an in-person workshop and some individual coaching sessions, and saw people move from a deep “fear of code” (FoC?) to being excited and starting to build their own tools.
The first licensing deal for a 15-hours training is on the way with a coding school in Portugal specialized in up-skilling non-IT workers (PMs, accountants, lawyers, businesspeople…). It might become the template for other licenses.
I added a lesson on how to use Google Colab rather than VS Code. Colab is a cloud-based virtual environment which includes Gemini. It sidesteps all setup difficulties people experienced with VS Code. If you want to try it, click here.

To conclude with a couple of recent ideas:

On my United flight I used the Wifi but it was quite unreliable, and annoying to try connecting again every now and then. So in less than 10 minutes I vibe coded a network tester, which would check connectivity and measure its speed every 5 min, and log it. Easy peasy!
I use ChatGPT a lot with voice on my phone instead of googling, but I find annoying to use the phone. So I am planning to build a “ChatGPT button”: a box with one button that I would press to start recording your question, then press again when I’m done, and that will give me a quick voice answer from ChatGPT. It took me about 15 minutes to write the python code for the voice => speech-to-text => generate answer => text-to-speech. Now I need to get a simple hardware and button to run it! Can I sell it to Sam Altman for $6.5 billion? Time will tell!

👉 Here is a coupon with the best price ($9.99) if you’d like to try the course. It is only valid for 3 DAYS so be quick! I recommend watching it all before trying to vibe code by yourself. It’s made for non-coders and I tried hard to make it fun, easy and practical — email me if you have any issues!

3. CULTURE

DOCUMENTARY

Becoming Led Zeppelin**
Watched on United. Didn’t learn much but still good vibes.

MOVIES

Boiling Point***
A chef reaches his boiling point in this movie shot in a single take. Impressive but stressful!

BROADWAY

Glengarry Glen Ross*
It really pains me to say I did not really enjoy my first broadway play! And this despite:

A cast I love (Bob Odenkirk & Michael McKean / Better Call Saul, Bill Burr, Kieran Culkin / Succession),
A movie I liked,
Having paid $200.

Other spectators seem to have loved it, though. Maybe it’s the jetlag, or having too high expectations? At last now I know!

4. THOUGHTS

Debunking Frogs and Marshmallows

There are two persistent myths:

The Boiling Frog. That it won’t notice it’s boiling. Actually, it will. I still think it’s useful as a shorthand, or as my friend Derek Sivers would say “Useful, Not True”.
The Marshmallow Test. That if a child can delay gratification they will be more successful later in life. Actually, there is no correlation at all. Also, they had not considered things like appetite, taste for sugar, trust in adults (will they really give me the 2 marshmallows they promised?). Self-regulation later in life (measured through surveys at ages 17, 27, and 37) was a better predictor of adult outcomes than marshmallow wait time. It can be learned!

Productive Laziness

On the Vibe Coding panel, the CTO talked about the joy of putting sometimes disproportionate effort into code to avoid doing some boring work. I have the exact same spirit with vibe coding!
The benefit of “doing” and acquiring new knowledge and skills pays off over time. For instance, by now I can whip out a custom web scraper in minutes, and use many other technology bricks to build quick programs. Productive laziness has compounding returns.

Constructive Struggle

I had some thoughts and discussions recently about the benefits of "“constructive struggle”.
As Nvidia's CEO said in a recent talk, struggle builds character (as long as it is not so hard it crushes you).
For instance, many immigrants work hard for the hope of a better life, but their kids often grow up with more comfort and do not have the same drive.
Similarly, children of well-off families, or kids with helicopter / lawnmower parents are deprived of the agency and growth opportunities from struggling.
Arguably, life throws enough struggle at everyone without trying, but could we pick some useful ones?
Now the questions is: how can you engineer constructive struggle when struggle is not necessary? I know jiu-jitsu was for me a chosen struggle (though I didn’t know I was going to get smashed for 2 years), and so were Asian languages I learned, and even learning python! Now that I’m a dad, I am thinking about what constructive struggle we should plan for our little boy ;)

Keep vibing!
— Ben

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