Starting from yesterday, my WeChat has crashed several times. At first, I thought it was just an isolated incident, but then I saw other friends in the group mention that their iPhone and Mac versions of WeChat had also crashed multiple times.
Combining this with what I complained about in my friends circle a few days ago, the new black border on WeChat that allows you to press and hold to convert to text and press and hold to speak is so ugly it's unbearable. So I said in the group: What's going on with WeChat? It suddenly changed from a perfect score to a zero score? Then a friend replied: Vibe coding is harmful, I want to ask if you dare to live in a house built with AI?
While there is no evidence to suggest how much vibe coding WeChat programmers employed, the recent ugly design and frequent crashes are indeed linked to vibe coding. That said, WeChat's full embrace of AI appears to be a fact. Last month, WeChat launched an AI writing assistant for Moments posts, drawing immediate backlash. Cheng Lingfeng commented: "WeChat has added AI-assisted writing for Moments and AI comment responses. Disappointing. Helping NPCs become NPCs. Fewer and fewer real people, and the core social graph is hollowing out. If the strongest platform for real people won't defend the baseline of human authenticity, who will?" Digital Life Kazik also wrote an article titled "These New AI Features from WeChat Are Killing the Last Bit of Humanity in Moments," which had been removed due to complaints by the time of publication, with the complaint type showing: infringement of reputation/goodwill/privacy/portrait rights.
The last time WeChat heavily promoted Video Accounts and Mini Stores, there were already complaints that WeChat was no longer restrained. However, at the time, it didn't have much of an impact on me, because when I saw the red notification dots, I could choose not to click, or if I did click and wasn't interested, I could just exit. But this time it's different. This time, AI is polluting the core functionality of WeChat, namely the chat and Moments ecosystem. When AI-generated content dominates Moments, and in the future, if WorkBuddy is fully integrated into WeChat, with a large amount of AI content occupying private chats and groups, it will affect everyone.
In the AI era, producing something has become too easy. However, the easier it becomes, the more restraint we should exercise.
When I opened "Product Philosophy Behind WeChat" once again, it plainly states: for new ideas, rejecting them 99% of the time is always the right call. When you need to decide whether an idea should be pursued, it's simple—reject it, don't do it, and that's that.
Former TikTok user-side product manager Gill Tan said:
Xiaohongshu's MVP was a PDF that could only be downloaded one page per day, and user stickiness was measured by how many people came back day after day to complete the download, which is a clever demand test as it uses users' willingness to incur costs as a signal.
During my recent vibe coding process, I discovered a new version of this logic. When you yourself are the target user, your MVP essentially determines how complete your final delivered product is. After the basic functions are working, are you willing to continue polishing those less flashy details and fixing various edge cases.
Because polishing details can be a painful process, if you don't actually need something, your attention will start to wander. But if you're willing to see it through to a truly finished and deliverable product, that in itself is a strong signal: as a user, you really do need it.
In the AI era, the friction in product production has become increasingly smaller. However, the friction in product-user matching has not decreased in tandem. Therefore, just because product development has become easier, it's not possible to launch 1,000 products for testing all at once. As a result, maintaining a certain degree of friction can actually be beneficial. This again highlights the value of signal transmission that I have been emphasizing: somewhat counterintuitively, high friction can reveal what is truly important to users.
At the beginning of the year, the concept of "daily disposable software" was very popular, and it even caused the stock prices of a number of SaaS companies to plummet. However, the problem is that people still need durable goods to meet their basic needs, which is the greatest common denominator of humanity. Just like how the emergence of daily disposable contact lenses did not make frame glasses obsolete, with the latter's market size being about 5-6 times that of the former. It's like, why bother creating a Shein when you can create a Uniqlo? Currently, the former has a market value of around $136 billion, while the latter has a market value of around $26 billion, with the former being about 5 times that of the latter.
WeChat, in my view, is a durable good that meets basic needs, with a value far exceeding that of disposable daily products.
It is hoped that WeChat does not lose its original intention, especially by learning from ByteDance, whose true product is its recommendation engine, rather than the superficial array of products, which later converged and became durable goods. If you use AI to create a slew of products but do not have something like a recommendation engine to underpin them, the result will be a futile effort.
In "The Product Philosophy Behind WeChat," there's also a sentence that says: Do you choose to show off your intelligence at all costs, or do you choose kindness?
In my view, WeChat stands as a quintessential example of Tencent's "technology for good" ethos. When it comes to the benevolence of AI, however, I have always maintained a measure of skepticism. AI is exceptionally intelligent, yet it may well lack genuine goodness at its core. I have said before: a vast portion of the world's text was written by people with ill intentions, and countless articles serve various ulterior motives—PR pieces being a prime example. The textual world, therefore, has never been a mirror of reality. As the saying goes, the gentleman is slow in speech but quick in action. I am inclined to believe that text reflects the darker side of the world, and thus large models born from the textual world are likely to be flawed at their very core.
A few days ago, I posted an article and someone commented below: "Stop writing this kind of article, it's of no benefit to yourself or others, what's the point of it?" I clicked on his WeChat profile and found that he's a public figure, with a title that reads: "Member of the Democratic Party, PhD in Economics, focused on original macroeconomic analysis." He serves as the host of a macroeconomic and financial exchange circle on Zhihu, with over 45,000 members in the community.
I suddenly realized that not everyone does things as spontaneously as I do, being an INFP, and that writing articles is often done for a reason, not just because one feels compelled to express themselves.
AI always reminds me of a phrase: clever words and charming appearance, yet lacking in benevolence. I think a good product should choose kindness, choose benevolence. Obviously, AI is the opposite of this.