Graduation Season: In the Age of Vibe Coding, Your Major Matters Less Than These 3 Life-Hacking Skills | 3 Old-Timers Show You How to Win by Playing Dirty
If life is a game of Vibe Coding, then most of us installed the wrong Skill at version 0.1.
You think life is a script with a clear outline, and as long as you follow the steps, you'll reach the end? Bullshit! Life is a Vibe Coding session that constantly throws errors, needs rewrites, and where the big model randomly glitches on you. Don't give me that crap about choosing the wrong major ruining your life. I'm telling you, even if you picked the world's number one computer science major back in the day, you'd still be getting crushed by AI today. Choose a major? Choose a damn major! In the age of Vibe Coding, picking a major is nothing compared to picking a good city, and picking a good city is nothing compared to installing these 3 life-hacking 'unorthodox' Skills.
The Biggest Bug: Getting on the Era's Pirate Ship and Then Jumping Off
Speaking of which, Rambo Liu has to tear open his own wounds for you. You know what the biggest bug in Rambo's life has been so far?
It's not returning to China early enough after going abroad, missing out on Beijing's most explosive wealth boom.
Rambo graduated college in 2001. Back then, his buddies who stayed in Beijing right after undergrad and started working used their meager salaries and housing funds to buy apartments. How much was Beijing back then? Four or five thousand RMB per square meter! Rambo was still studying in London when he got an overseas letter from a buddy saying he bought a place, took on a loan of over 300,000 RMB, and expected to pay it off until he retired at 60. Rambo secretly laughed at him: so young and already burdened with a mortgage, how pathetic!
And then? Within a few years, they swapped small apartments for big ones, and big ones for villas. By the time the 4 trillion stimulus hit in 2008, Rambo had missed the boat again. This is classic 'doing pushups in an elevator.' You think you're climbing stairs, step by step, exhausted like a dog, but others are lying in the elevator and still reaching the top. You jumped off the ship—no matter how fast you climb, can you beat the elevator?
So instead of agonizing over which crappy major to pick, you'd better choose a city wisely. Geographic determinism is always the hard truth. Where you spend your four years of college, who you hang out with, whether you have roots in that city—that's at least ten thousand times more important than studying real estate management, advertising, or even computer science!
Is Computer Science Still Worth It? AI Has Taken Over the Grunt Work
Someone will surely object: 'What if I go all in on computer science now? Can I ride the wave of the times?'
Save it! Back in the day, studying CS meant riding China's software boom, with extreme talent scarcity—they hired everyone they could get. On a construction site, someone has to carry bricks, right? Those dirty, tiring jobs used to require tons of cheap, durable labor to hand-code. But now?
Look at the recent news: Anthropic's Claude 5 was released on Wednesday, and by yesterday the US government had urgently banned it. Why? Because this thing is too damn powerful! It can directly delegate high-level intelligence, doing all the work of mid-to-senior engineers! They don't dare let this thing loose, because it's like selling nuclear weapons as fireworks!
What does that mean? It means previously you'd spend 20 years mastering a peerless martial art, and now someone spends $9.99 on a cheat code and beats the crap out of you in one move. AI iterates every six months now. By the time you finish four years of college, AI will have gone through eight generations. By then, writing code is just the most basic baseline ability.
Before, coding accounted for 30% of software engineering. Now that 30% doesn't need you at all. AI handles the grunt work. You need to tell AI 'what to build,' not 'how to mix cement.' If you don't understand the underlying theory of operating systems, how software is scheduled, and you can only write a few lines of crappy code, then your value is less than a scallion at the market.
If you're a true tech geek from childhood, go ahead and study CS—I won't stop you. But if you're just looking for a stable job? I advise you to admit defeat early.
The Liberal Arts Comeback and 'Rich People Thinking'
You might not know this, but I'm a liberal arts major in Japanese. In the internet age, that's a double mistake!
Back then, I skipped class every day, bribed the class monitor to say I was sick, and went to study how to make web pages. I didn't know anything, but I loved tinkering. Looking back, those years I was as lost as a dog that can't find its way home, not knowing what to do. But in this age of Vibe Coding, I suddenly realized: spring has come for liberal arts students!
Before, writing code was a barrier. Now I don't care about grammar at all—I just use natural language as prompts, ask AI when I don't know, or throw it to tech-savvy friends. The education system just collapses, becomes obsolete! I don't need to slog through brick-like textbooks; I learn programming like playing a game.
This brings up a brutal reality: in this era, we can no longer live with 'poor people thinking.' What is poor people thinking? It's 'saving tokens.' You're timid, afraid of choosing the wrong major, afraid of taking the wrong path, and you stubbornly stick to one plan. What is 'rich people thinking'? I have plenty of tokens, run three plans simultaneously, and use whichever works! But sadly, our life time is linear—we can't work three jobs at once. That means you don't need to bet everything on a 'perfect plan,' because you can't plan it out anyway!
3 Life-Hacking 'Unorthodox' Skills
Since majors are worthless and planning is a joke, what Skills should we install during those four years of college? Don't tell me to study hard and improve every day. These 3 application-level 'unorthodox' Skills are the top-tier cheats that will let you survive in the age of Vibe Coding.
Skill #1: Fiercely protect your curiosity. We were taught from childhood to be obedient, and curiosity was suppressed into a defective product by exam-oriented education. You think curiosity is a luxury? Wrong! It's the underlying system-level prompt! Many people are gaslit into thinking they don't work hard enough. Do you think Musk built rockets and PayPal because he pulled all-nighters at the library? You didn't see him when he was dating and making babies! Free time breeds curiosity, and curiosity lets you ask good questions in the AI era.
Skill #2: Master public expression to the max. In the future, even if your code is a pile of crap, as long as you can talk about it like a work of art, you win. No matter how brilliant your idea is, if you can't speak clearly in human language and go mute in front of a camera, your talent is worthless.
Skill #3: Date more people (boyfriends/girlfriends)! Don't laugh—I'm absolutely serious. This is an extremely hardcore, comprehensive application Skill. A boy's rapid maturation is often forged by a girlfriend's tough love.
When you turn on 'dating mode,' your curiosity, expression skills, and empathy all get forced out. You skip class to be with your partner, engage with society, and handle extremely complex emotional issues. What's that called? 'Managing upward'! You think playing video games in the dorm or getting perfect but useless grades makes you a good student? Wrong! In the social melting pot, this kind of people experience is ten thousand times more valuable than a perfect score.
Four Years, One Throw: Your Youth Isn't for Planning
Recently, a few buddies and I used Claude Code and Codex to whip up a little game in Feishu called 'Four Years, One Throw.' On the surface, you pick a school, draw a personality, and roll dice to get through four years of college. But actually, every square you land on forces a choice: when you draw a chance card, should you take an internship? Should you study for credits or go on a date?
In this game, no opportunity is free. Every skipped class, every heartbreak, every missed chance gets tallied at the end into your experience and transformation score.
We used to think life needed a perfect plan, and one wrong step would ruin everything. But life can't be planned! Life is Vibe Coding—you just provide the direction and vibe, and leave the specific coding to fate and AI. Even if you chose the wrong major and studied something completely useless, as long as your vibe is right and you follow a path, you can still open the door to a new world.
Rambo used to be super intense, forcing his kids to learn this and that, making the father-son relationship tense. Then Rambo figured it out: instead of spending 12 units of effort convincing and pushing them, it's better to spend 10 units pushing myself. Since I already missed out on five apartments in Beijing, I'll just fight for four in Vancouver.
There's no bad code in life—as long as the vibe is right.
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