When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone in the audience asked him if the HBO satire “Silicon Valley” would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially said no (in timestamp 38:17).
Although writers talk about it regularly, he said, they don’t pursue it because today’s Silicon Valley is so weird it can’t be parodied.
The last case is a new company called Clad Labs launched by Y Combinator this week. Clad’s product is so out of the box that people thought it was an April Fool’s joke back in November.
But it’s a real product, founder Richard Wang told TechCrunch. The product is called “Chad: The Brainrot IDE”. It’s another complete vibe coding development environment – an IDE is what software developers use to code – but with a twist. While waiting for the AI coding tool to finish its work, the developer can engage in his favorite activities in an IDE window.
Or, as the company’s website advertises: “Gamble while you code. Watch TikToks. Swipe on Tinder. Play minigames. This is no joke — it’s the Chad IDE, and it solves the biggest productivity problem in AI development that nobody’s talking about.”
The founders say their IDE increases productivity by helping with “environment switching.” Their argument is that by doing your brain activity in the IDE itself, once the AI is done with the task, you’ll be right back to work instead of focusing on your phone or browser.
Reaction in X it was mixed. While some people thought it was a fake satire, others thought it was a good – or a terrible – idea.
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Love it or hate it, everyone had an opinion, even Jordi Hays, co-host of the enthusiastically pro-tech podcast TBPN. Hey wrote a post about the product it’s called, “Rage Baiting is for losers”. In it he said of the Chad IDE: “On the one hand it’s funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why is it on the official YC account?”
He argued that products like the Chad IDE and Cluely have moved bait-rage from a marketing ploy to a “product strategy” and “really shouldn’t be.” He urged YC to start teaching founders that “bait rage is for losers.”
This is particularly interesting advice from someone who, as a founder, had mastered viral marketing without fury. Hays and his wife Sarah founded Party Round, a crowdfunding startup that went viral for their friendly marketing gimmicks like launching NFT versions of top “helpful” VCs. (Party Round was renamed Capital and sold to Rho in 2024.)
Wang tells TechCrunch what haters don’t understand about his mind IDE is that it wasn’t meant to be outrage bait. The founders hope it becomes a truly beloved vibe AI coder for consumer app-type developers. They want to give these people a consumer app-like experience in an IDE.
Although the product is real, it is not yet available to the public.
“We are currently in closed beta,” Wang said. Currently, Chad is trying to build a “community” of users who like the idea. Clad Labs hopes to open the product to the public soon, but for now, users have to get an invite from someone already in beta.
No doubt there is a certain type of developer who would love Chad. But whatever the future holds for this product, one thing is true: It’s nearly impossible to parody Silicon Valley these days.
