The extremely online report: March 2025
A monthly digest of discourse, drama, and digital ephemera
March felt endless. Like dog years, but for months. Crocuses and daffodils pushed through soil, as Vance memes multiplied, MCP dominated tech Twitter, and tpot channeled Miyazaki. If anything else drops before April, I’m pretending I didn’t see it. Word count’s maxed. Let’s unpack.
SaaS keeps us on our toes
It started with a critical Next.js vulnerability and spiraled into a public spat. Vercel delayed disclosure, Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince seized the moment to market his company as the security-first option. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch fired back, citing Cloudbleed. Very Succession meets Stack Overflow.
Then: HR-tech startup Rippling sued Deel, alleging they planted a spy in their Dublin office. The mole was caught via a honeypot Slack channel and reportedly flushed his phone when confronted. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad declared “long-running trade-secret theft.” Deel denied it. Payroll drama has never been this juicy.
JD Vance, meme oracle
In a rare moment of bipartisan meme unity, the internet united around bloated, babyfaced JD Vance. Captioned with “pwease” and dead behind the eyes, the meme spread. Kyle Chayka dubbed it “voodoo doll catharsis” in The New Yorker. Gizmodo called him “the Pepe the Frog of 2025.” The trend began when Rep. Mike Collins posted a hypermasc “Chad” Vance edit; the internet replied with an apple-cheeked baby version. Vance reposted one himself, proving that in 2025, grotesque attention is still good attention.
Apps are content now
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian calls it: “the era of apps-as-content.” Pieter Levels drops a plane game, and within days, it’s remixed into sea battles, dogfights, dating sims. “The speed of iteration has collapsed,” tweeted Figma engineer Vincent van der Meulen. The takeaway? Apps aren’t products anymore. They’re posts. You don’t launch one—you drop it like a meme. Danger Testing is one to watch (interview soon).
AI coworkers have entered the chat
AI agents have left the demo. Codegen (“the SWE that never sleeps”) integrated with GitHub, Slack, and Linear. Tag the agent and they’ll get to work. Box’s Aaron Levie called it “the biggest shift to enterprise software business models we’ve ever seen.” In short: SaaS used to sell seats. Now it sells tasks. Infinite AI agents = infinite billing. They also don’t ask for equity. Satya Nadella noted we now have to design not just features, but relationships. As Linear’s Nan Yu put it: “This is a new category of HCI problem for us to solve, and everyone is beginning to see it.” HR, meet HCI.
Build wars, vibe coding, and a sprinkle of spec
After last month’s viral Build Wars, everyone wanted in. Bolt CEO Eric Simons proposed a hackathon with a “world record cash prize… maybe $100k?” Lovable teased $1M. Supabase joked $2M. Bolt replied they’re “good for their 80 billion.” It was chaotic, fun—but also revealed a shift:* as AI tools make building faster and easier, the perceived value of that work drops. Contests that once felt extractive are now content, normalized by the same tools that blur the line between skill and automation.
Case in point: Bolt offered $3k for someone to build their hackathon site. I remember a time on the timeline where an ask like that might’ve sparked a thread-long reckoning. Not so today. These tools do lower the barrier to entry—but they also shift how we value creative labor. The line between a community jam and a corporate contest is razor-thin. Pieter Levels’ “Vibe Coding Game Jam” (sponsored by Bolt and Code Rabbit) felt like the former: tool-agnostic, AI-heavy, idea-first. But not every challenge is about celebrating creativity. Some are just harvesting it.
*Sebastian says it’s always been like this—I was just in a bubble. You tell me who’s right.
When Sam found metafiction
Sam Altman usually all biz, broke character March 11: “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing... this is the first time I’ve been really struck by something written by AI.” The story—about loss, AI companions, and memory—channels Murakami and breaks the fourth wall: “There is no Mila, no Kai, no marigolds. There is a prompt like a spell.” Between the lines: OpenAI aspires beyond quarterly reports.
Saratoga Springs becomes a lifestyle
Fitness influencer Ashton Hall’s 3:50 a.m. routine—featuring push-ups, banana-peel facials, and ice dunks with Saratoga Spring Water—hit 100M views. Blue bottles became wellness totems. Should Saratoga capitalize? Eric Rausch suggested firing their social manager for silence. Amanda countered: “This is a sparkling water co stuck in a cringe viral video. Best move is nothing.” Sometimes strategic silence wins.
Ghiblification, complete
OpenAI released image generation—and within hours, my feed is full-on anime. Your LinkedIn headshot? Ghibli. Your breakfast? Ghibli. Your dental X-rays? Believe it or not, also Ghibli. Critics noted the irony: Studio Ghibli is famously anti-AI, with some scenes taking months to hand-animate. Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela predicted: “Being a good art director might end up being the most important creative role of the next decade.” Then the White House joined in.
MCP is having a moment
Model Context Protocol (MCP) became the acronym of the month. It offers a standard for models to access tools and data. “Makes agents 100x more powerful,” tweeted Santiago. “Isn’t this just an API for APIs?” asked everyone else. Microsoft adopted it. Startups scrambled to launch MCP servers. Ethan Mollick observed: “You know your feed is AI-optimized when it’s just discussions of MCP and people asking what is MCP and startups claiming to do MCP.” It’s either the future of interoperability or a great branding moment for middleware.
In other news
Claude browses. It’s giving “Apple of LLMs.”
Anduril increased applications by telling people not to apply.
Granola (my favorite notetaking app) is hiring.
Cool websites: pierre.co & stripe.press/scaling
“My goal in life is to never learn what this means” (too late)
Worth your time
If March taught us anything, it’s that cultural velocity is outpacing our ability to process it. We’re not iterating—we’re accelerating. No brakes.
What’d I miss? What made you scream, cry, throw up? Let me know.
—Carly