The things Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg allow — and forbid — their daughter to vibe code

Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter is vibe coding.

Her mom isn’t vibing with the open web.

The Meta CEO has long set tech restrictions on his children.

In 2019, he told Fox News that he liked that his kids could video chat with their extended family, but didn’t want them to sit in front of a computer “for a long time.” We’re now in the age of AI, and the Zuckerbergs — like parents everywhere — have a whole new technology to contend with.

In a Monday profile about her husband in Colossus, Priscilla Chan showed Jeremy Stern her daughter’s account on Replit, a vibe coding platform.

While she lets her daughters explore, Chan said she limits the kinds of apps they can build. “She’s quite limited, because Mom doesn’t let her build things that are open to the internet,” Chan said.

Chan walked through some of her daughter’s vibe-coded creations, like a messaging app.

There were also apps similar to GeoCities and the game FarmVille, according to Colossus.

Like her father, Zuckerberg’s daughter seems to have an entrepreneurial spirit.

Each app included a plan for marketing and sales plan.

Other things were off limits. “She wanted to build a dating site,” Chan said. “That was a no.” Zuckerberg’s children have long been experimenting with AI tech.

In 2024, he said that his daughter was 40 pages into writing a novel about “mermaid crystals” with AI-generated images. (It’s not immediately clear which of Zuckerberg’s three daughters was vibe coding.

August, their middle child, wrote the mermaid book.) Chan isn’t alone in limiting her daughter’s access to the web.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai didn’t give his middle-school-aged kid a phone, and Mark Cuban set up special routers to monitor his kids’ internet usage at home.

The tech tradition dates back to Steve Jobs, who famously didn’t let his kids use the iPad he helped create.

Meta is investing big in AI, pouring more and more cash into the expansion of its computing power.

The company has its own vibe coding product, which it announced in August, as well as the new personal agent Muse.

Zuckerberg said he used Muse to find kid-friendly recipes.

For the record, Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to be pushing his daughter’s vibe coding. “He didn’t tell her to do any of this,” Chan told the publication. “It’s been all on her own,” she added.