Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin (born 1963 on Long Island) co-founded Def Jam Recordings in his NYU dorm room in 1984 and went on to produce era-defining records for the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Slayer, Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Adele. Famous for claiming he can’t play instruments or work a mixing board — his instrument is taste — he distilled that philosophy into the 2023 bestseller “The Creative Act.”

The Tao of the prompt

In May 2025 Rubin launched “The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding,” a collaboration with Anthropic that reworks all 81 chapters of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching into meditations on creating software through intuition, each paired with an interactive artifact generated by Claude that visitors can remix with their own prompts.

For Rubin, prompting an AI is continuous with his whole career: the producer who admits he knows nothing about music sees “vibe coding” — building software with no programming knowledge — as the same trick. He has likened the moment to punk rock, when attitude and ethos let untrained kids start bands, and told MusicRadar the vibe-coding process “feels familiar” to any artist’s workflow. The project landed him on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI list for 2025.

Some observers found the project an odd fit — the high priest of analog authenticity, whose book barely mentions technology, lending his mystique to an AI lab’s flagship product. But Rubin has never equated authenticity with tools; his consistent message is that the source of art is the human impulse, and the instrument — guitar, sampler, or model — is incidental.