Everything is Changing: From Growth Hacking to Vibe Coding, and Back Again
Agentic AI, Context engineering, LLMOps
Contrast 2016 vs 2026: Growth Hacking → Vibe Coding — this talk charts the move from wrangling data and early ML to orchestrating intelligent agents: growth evolving from manual hacking to autonomous orchestration.
It introduces Vibe Coding (expressing creative and strategic intent through tone, emotion, and narrative instead of code), frames marketers as Grandmasters guiding networks of sub-agents across tools like Clay, PostHog, Synter.ai, Loops.so, StackAdapt, Reddit, and LinkedIn, and defines the human role as Orchestrators, not Operators with Intent Engineering as a key skill.
We come full circle: AI frees creativity while growth becomes a living system.
Joel S. Horwitz is a growth hacker, engineer, and entrepreneur at the intersection of AI, creativity, and performance marketing.
He currently leads Growth at Sourcegraph and is the founder of Synter.ai built with Amp, an AI-native media platform that helps B2B technology companies launch campaigns autonomously creates media plans, executes them across ad platforms, and continuously optimizes by integrating with analytics platforms.
Over the past decade, Joel has built scalable go-to-market systems for developer tools, AI infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS brands such as SingleStore, Sourcegraph, Anaconda, Weights & Biases, IBM Watson, Alpine Data Labs, Datameer, AVG Technologies, and many more.
A decade ago, Joel was part of the first wave of Growth Hackers — building experiments, automations, and predictive models with homegrown machine learning algorithms became AI became accessible to everyone.
Today, he is pioneering the next shift: Agentic Growth Systems, where AI agents and sub-agents orchestrate marketing like a chess grandmaster directing a board of self-learning players.