Notch posted "Reject AI" in July and was reviewing the Claude Code plugin by August

The two-word post pulled 5.3 million views. The position behind it lasted exactly two weeks.

The sequence

On July 14 Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, tweeted “Reject AI.” It collected 69,000 likes.

On July 21 he admitted he “just might give vibe coding a shot.” His stated reason was not a change of heart about programming. He cannot find programmers to build the dull tools for his new dungeon crawler, and he joked that he needed tips on restaurants that serve crow.

By July 28 he was already using it: “Sure, claude, let’s see what you got! Can I still make fun of vibe coders if I become one?” By August 11 he had settled into the register of an ordinary user, reviewing the Claude Code plugin for WebStorm as “a bit janky, and has no humor.”

The position he started from

This is the same person who wrote in February that anyone advocating AI-assisted coding is “incompetent or evil,” as Fortune reported. The July post was not an offhand comment, it was consistent with a stance he had held publicly for months.

What actually moved him

The reversal did not come from an argument or a marketing campaign. It came from a hiring problem plus direct contact with the tools.

That pattern repeats among the loudest skeptics. The objection is usually framed in terms of craft or ethics, and the thing that dissolves it is a specific piece of work nobody wants to do and nobody is available to do. Persson did not concede the principle. He conceded the dungeon crawler’s tooling, which turned out to be enough.