Pocket's AI made my game ideas real. Now Meta controls the results.

The relatively recent rise of AI-assisted coding tools and the whole concept of “vibe coding” have effectively upended entire software development workflows. While these tools have been available to novice coders willing to put in the work to set them up, those with little to no coding experience could still be a little put off by the CLIs, IDEs, and terminal-based tinkering needed to create a complex AI-coded project these days.

Meta’s latest AI-based project launch wants to make that kind of vibe coding as instantly accessible as posting on social media. Pocket—which launched in the US last Friday, August 21, after Meta acquired the staff behind the now-defunct vibe-coding app Gizmo in March—is a mobile app that lets users create fully functional interactive “gizmos” just by typing prompts into a text box, without even the option to look at a line of code. Those gizmos can then be shared with the world in a TikTok-style endless scroll complete with likes, comments, reposts, and all the other hallmarks of social media addiction.

After playing around with Pocket for the better part of a week, I found myself getting hooked on the simple process of quickly standing up functional, relatively feature-rich game prototypes simply by chatting with an LLM. But the result of all that time and AI effort is a couple of interactive toys that are effectively trapped in Meta’s new walled garden, without any real way to turn them into something separate.

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