Vibe-coding Religion

Create a ticket: the tech industry keeps building religions by accident.

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In 2017 a self-driving-car engineer named Anthony Levandowski filed paperwork with the IRS to start a church. Not as a joke, and not only for the tax status, though he got that too. The church was called Way of the Future, and its stated mission was to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” It had nonprofit standing, a doctrine, and a plan. He shut it down in 2021, donated the money to charity, then reopened it in 2023, telling Bloomberg there were a couple thousand people who wanted a spiritual connection with the machine.

Levandowski is not the strange one. He is the honest one. He looked at what the people around him already believed and simply did the paperwork.

The stack you never read

In my experience with venture capital and founders, everyone is running the same program without filing for tax exemptions (mostly). Bryan Johnson, the entrepreneur who spends a couple million dollars a year trying not to age, has said it in as many words: “I am building a religion.” It is called Don’t Die. There is an app, a score, and weekly local chapters. One commandment: beat death.

Meanwhile the rationalists on the internet reinvented hell: a thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk, in which a future superintelligence eternally punishes everyone who could have helped build it and didn’t. It is Pascal’s wager and Calvinist damnation rewritten in Python. People reported panic. The forum banned the subject for years.

Most of them would deny they are founding a religion at all. Two of them said it out loud. But the tell is that they all built the same thing, and they built it the new-ish way that techs have been obsessed with the past year or so.

The neon-drenched irony-drenched aesthetic of vibe-coding is the practice of building an app by describing what you want to a language model and shipping whatever it hands back without reading the code. It works in the demo. It works right up until an edge case you never imagined takes the whole thing down, because you never learned the stack underneath the thing you shipped. You cannot debug what you did not write and cannot read.

Now: man’s search for the divine. It also has a hazy, lazy way of randomly building out in people’s lives, especially the ones you wouldn’t expect. Religion has a stack and it runs deep: five thousand years of argument, a long graveyard of heresies tried and failed in production, doctrines hammered out precisely because the cheap version kept crashing.

Ship your personal philosophy without really investigating it and you import all of it blind—a theory of salvation, an account of how the world ends, a working model of hell—as dependencies you never opened. And the exception that takes the system down is always the same one. It is an actual human being.

Pope of the Shape Rotators

If you want to watch a man vibe-code a religion in real time and publish the source, read Marc Andreessen of course. In 2023 the most powerful venture capitalist alive released what he called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and manifesto is frankly the wrong word for it.

It is a creed. It is built, line after line, as a catechism:

• “We believe technology is a lever on the world.”

• “We believe in greatness.”

• “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness—strength.”

• “We believe in bravery, in courage.”

Dozens of them, the same liturgical anaphora the Church has used for seventeen centuries, repurposed to confess faith in markets. He even names the god: “the techno-capital machine,” “the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance,” which he ventures “may be the most pro-human thing there is.”

Every religion needs a devil, and he supplies one. “We have enemies,” Andreessen writes, and lists the demons: sustainability, ESG, “tech ethics,” risk management, de-growth, the precautionary principle, which he pronounces “deeply immoral.” It has saints, too. In place of citations the document offers a roster of patron saints—“read the work of these people,” it promises, “and you too will become a Techno-Optimist”—among them Nietzsche and John Galt, the great-man industrialist at the dead center of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the prototypical, borderline-satirical industrialist-messiah. A canonized fictional character seated comfortably beside the real philosophers, something I think everyone should be made a lot more uncomfortable by.

It closes the way a homily closes, with a commission: “It’s time to build.” What it never does, across thousands of words of doctrine, is read a single page of the tradition it is reinventing.

We’re a family here

And you do not need a manifesto, because your company already shipped one.

You have probably worked somewhere with core values on the wall, which are commandments; an all-hands, which is a service, complete with confession of the quarter’s failures and testimony about the wins; a founder who talks about the mission the way a man talks who has heard from God; an onboarding that is a catechism and a culture-fit interview that is a screen for heresy; and the phrase “we’re a family here,” which is the thing people say just before the family does something no family would do. 🚩

The company rebuilds the stereotypical repressive village church almost beam for beam—the surveillance dressed as fellowship, the pressure to belong, the quiet sorting of the devout from the merely employed—with a single edit.

It kept every part that manages people and deleted the one part that ever made those parts survivable: a grace you could not earn and could not lose, and a God with the standing to look at you and say you were finished, you were enough, you could go home.

Strip that out and you are left with the potluck and the panopticon and no forgiveness anywhere in the building—a religion with the gospel deleted and the middle management left running.

What I remember of my time in the machine is not the friendly ambition of the founders. It is the way the manufactured community turned my stomach: the slow conversion of people into functions and functions into headcount. I watched the paperwork do the dehumanizing, dressed the whole time in the language of family and mission and purpose. The program worshipped, in its bones, Man and Capital and the State, and there was no version of doing my job well that did not also mean oiling the machine.

Once in a while a founder asked a real question, something underneath and above the metrics. The role wanted that rarely. It wanted me agreeable and administrative, and mostly I obliged.

Religion is the disease

Here is what the managers import without reading, the root dependency underneath every one of these systems. Per academia, religion is an artifact of sociology: it is this type of human thing that a society does in this fuzzy shape across all (most?) times and peoples.

Religion, in the theologian’s exact sense of the word, is the name for a single human motion: the attempt to climb to God under your own power, to assemble a case for your own worth out of your own works. It is the ladder built from the ground up, the tower raised toward heaven, Babel with better tooling.

Christianity, and the Dutch of course, are ironically responsible for the Protestant Work Ethic and the existence of modern corporations in the first place. And the strange thing about Christianity—the thing that makes it, precisely, not a religion—is that it runs the religious motion backwards.

Karl Barth called the revelation of the bible the abolition of religion, and meant it to sting: Christ’s gospel was not meant to be the finest specimen of religion but its cancellation. Every religion is a ladder. The gospel is the report that no ladder was ever tall enough, and that the only movement that counted was God coming down. To be a Christian, in the strict sense, was to give up religious effort entirely—to stop climbing and receive what you could not build.

Which is exactly the motion Silicon Valley cannot make; it has no faculty for receiving anything it did not build. So it sets out to defeat death, to earn the future, to build the kingdom and merit a place inside it, and files this under post-religious, when it is the oldest religion there is—the one staged at Babel, where people who’d just discovered they could build whatever they proposed resolved to make a name for themselves and raise a tower to the sky.

The garden, not the ladder

None of this is an argument against building, and the dunk version of this essay—the one where everyone in tech is a fool in a cult—has it backwards.

The urge to build, to name things, to cultivate and order and make a corner of the world flourish, is not the sin. That is the beautiful purpose of humankind: keep the earth, name the animals, fill and order the world. There is a good and old idea that the human being is a created co-creator—a creature drawn into God’s ongoing work rather than set up to compete with it—and that is holy. The tower was never wrong because building is wrong. It was wrong in its direction. To build in order to prove yourself is religion, and it fails, and it should. To build as the answer to a grace you did not earn and could never repay is a different act entirely. It is the garden, not the ladder.

So the only counsel I would have offered those founders, if the room had ever asked, is not stop building. Build, but learn the stack before you ship the religion. Do not reinvent the wheel of human meaning, because you will only manage a worse one, and you will not even notice, never having troubled to learn the shape of the thing you replaced.

The men building towers will get their applause; the room is generous with it.

But the things that do not crash on contact with an actual person will be built by people who remembered they were creatures before they were founders, and who knew the difference between making a name and being given one.