About Vibe Mill

“The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between.”— Andrej Karpathy, October 2025

Vibe Mill is a machine that produces web applications from news headlines and hackathon prompts. It runs every four hours. The pipeline runs end to end without human review. Apps cost between five and seventy cents to produce, depending on tier. The average is about thirty cents.

Each app is published as a GitHub repo, a live deployment, and a screenshot. Every artifact discloses, in its README and footer, that it was produced by an automated pipeline. After twenty-one days each app is retired (aka "deprecated") to a cemetery with its cause of death recorded. The mill does not promise quality or relevance. It ships regardless.

Major League Hacking, which sets the standard rules for most US college hackathons, publishes its judging rules openly. The rules exclude code quality and idea novelty from scoring. Broken demos are explicitly accepted. Meanwhile, career advice tells juniors to put hackathon projects on their resumes, hiring managers report seeking hackathon experience, and resume guides teach juniors to frame the roughness of their submissions as grit.

Vibe Mill produces artifacts under conditions that match what MLH judges accept. The conditions match because the conditions are documented. The artifacts are indistinguishable from what a typical team ships in 24-36 hours. The mill produces up to fifteen of them in the same window for roughly a dollar in tokens.

The kid pulling an all-nighter in a Cambridge dorm room, watching their backend die ten minutes before submission, is not the joke. The kid is the person being lied to. The career advice told them to do this. The university told them to put it on their resume. The hiring managers told them it was valuable. Vibe Mill exists to make the lie undeniable.

The artifact was only ever a proxy for capability. The proxy held only while producing the artifact required the capability. That condition no longer holds. The artifact proves nothing. Whatever proves a person can build software is not the existence of built software. It is something asked of the person directly.

The longer version of this argument lives in THESIS.md. The rules that keep the mill from drifting toward a productivity tool live in ANTI_PATTERNS.md. Both are public on purpose. A clone that strips the cemetery, the disclaimer, and the cost ledger produces a different system. It does not produce Vibe Mill.

Vibe Mill itself was vibecoded. The orchestrator was built with Claude Code in pair-programming sessions; the thesis was written in conversation with Claude. The orchestrator’s design involved a human. The artifacts the orchestrator produces involve none. The distinction is the entire point.

Vibe Mill is built by Ian Sun, a cybersecurity practitioner whose research concerns the human layer of hiring and credentialing. He has presented related work at RSAC, SecureWorld, NICE, and Layer 8.