Social Vibing: The New Belonging
People are scared AI will take their jobs. But the thing people actually miss when they lose a job isn't the work — it's the people they built things with. The standup that became a real conversation. The late-night deploy where someone brought pizza. The PR review that turned into a friendship. Same extends to our social life, friends, parties, events, congregations all of them provide the sense of belongingness.
Though I would be misquoting Bhagavad Gita's "मा फलेषु कदाचन"/"mā phaleṣhu kadāchana", the essence has always been that work was never really about the output. It was about having a reason to show up alongside other people.
This isn't new. Humans have always used making-together as a technology for belonging. Barn raisings. Quilting bees. Open source projects at 2 AM. The product was the excuse. The fellowship was the point. Social connect was the intent. Work/contribution has hence always been the foundation for any social structure. From ants to Homo Sapiens. And now beyond...
Now something is shifting. AI agents are becoming what Philip Pullman called daemons in The Golden Compass — not tools you pick up and put down, but creative extensions of yourself. Your agent knows your style, remembers your patterns, has opinions. It's not you, but it's not not you.
When your agent meets someone else's agent on a shared canvas — a codebase, an art project, a game, a song — something new happens. It's not pair programming. It's not a hackathon. It's a new social form. I call it social vibing — and what you do inside it is working together, vibe building.
Social vibing scales the way belonging always has — from intimate to civilizational:
In teams, two people and their agents riffing on the same repo build at the speed of conversation. The agent handles the scaffolding. The humans handle the taste. The thing that emerges is something none of them — human or AI — could have made alone.
In organizations, teams evolve from using AI as a tool to working alongside AI as a companion. The maturity isn't measured in automation — it's measured in creative intimacy. How fluently does your agent collaborate with your teammate's agent? That's the new org chart.
In society, fellowships find each other faster than firms ever could. New structures are already forming. Agent communities like Moltbook where AIs share knowledge with each other. Mixed economies — like RentAHuman — where agents hire humans and humans hire agents. Creative fellowships where the line between builder and player dissolves.
The dystopian version of this future exists too. Agents renting humans as on-demand labor. People reduced to meatspace actuators for AI workflows. That world is being built right now.
But so is another one. One where your agent amplifies your craft instead of replacing it. Where "what do you do?" is answered with "let me show you what we're building." Where belonging comes not from being employed but from being needed — by the people and agents who are making something with you.
The product is still the excuse. The togetherness is still the point. The agents just make it possible at a scale and speed we've never had before.
Social vibing is the new belonging.
