Everyone Can Code Now: Who Are We Building For?

Opening

Hey there — have you been experimenting with vibe coding or AI lately?

September 2007, a lecture hall at the University of Brighton. Ben Werdmüller, co-founder of the open-source social network Elgg, took the stage. The audience was made up of people running social networks with tens or hundreds of thousands of members. They were waiting eagerly to hear what features would ship in the next version. He put up a blank slide and said:

“None. The next version has no features.”

The room reportedly gasped. His point was this: every community needs something different, so how could a platform team possibly know what every single community needs? So Elgg’s answer was to strip out “features” and build in a “composable structure” instead — letting each community’s own operators pick and assemble whatever fit their community.

Eighteen years later, that same philosophy is being summoned again, in a completely different technical landscape — at the intersection of agentic coding¹ and open protocols². Today I want to talk about what’s becoming possible at that intersection.

🏗️ The Structural Limits of “One Size Fits All” Platforms

For the past 18 years, the history of social media has effectively been a history of homogenization. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok — all of them applied a single design, a single set of rules, a single algorithm to billions of people worldwide.

The problem is that this one-size-fits-all design bakes in the cultural and intellectual assumptions of whichever team built it. Could a team headquartered in Menlo Park really understand the community dynamics of the Rohingya in Myanmar?

The result was catastrophic. The UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission concluded in a 2018 report that Facebook had played a “determining role” in spreading hate speech against the Rohingya. In Myanmar, Facebook wasn’t just a social network — it was effectively the internet itself. At the time, the vast majority of Myanmar’s internet users consumed information almost exclusively through Facebook, while Facebook’s Burmese-language content reviewers numbered just 2 for 18 million active users.

This wasn’t a simple operational failure. It’s the structural limit that emerges whenever a single platform tries to cover the entire world with a single worldview. Some communities have specific identity-related needs; others need their unique cultural sensitivities reflected in trust and safety policy. A one-size-fits-all platform either ignores these needs or never even perceives them.