I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?

I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.

FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:

some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,

a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,

people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,

a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)

Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.

Webpage is down for me?

Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation.

However 2 things are very specific to this case:

1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.

2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.