Vibe Coding: Think Slow, Cultivate Taste, and Build Fast

Vibe coding is the next evolution of Prompt Engineering, when you instruct your AI Agents to run autonomously. The best example is Claude Code, but there are more.

Vibe coding is best when you have a framework around it. This is what we had with Data Warehouse Automation tools, and e.g., dbt.

We need to bring that back. Or like I use with GoHugo, it’s a predefined framework with rules and governance, so the LLM is very good at adding things, versus starting from Scratch.

Simon Whiteley with Advancing Analytics building something called LakeForge, which is essentially that too. The framework is the Declarative Data Stack, if it’s all code, the better. And LLMs can then extend and enhance.

It’s similar to Spec Driven Development (SDD), where we write our instructions in claude.md and Claude or any AI Agents implement them. Also, what Esco Obong said what they do at Airbnb, the hard part is coming up with the spec, talking to business, etc. The Coding part is small.

I think a framework with clear rules and guardrails, like the declarative data stack, works best with agents, such as my website built with GoHugo. Building one from Scratch, AI is terrible at it (at least from a maintainability perspective), but from an existing Hugo setup, amazing.

I wrote a little more about « Data Modeling for the Agentic Era: Semantics, Speed, and Stewardship», which applies to any agent’s project, not just data modeling.

I think. If you’re building right now. You should go hard all-in on what’s happening right now. Raphael Schaad. Tweet

Building, or just prompting? Not sure if that will lead us to a good place. To build for ourselves, sure, it’s fun. But for professional services, not so sure, yet.

But also, if you don’t use it, you get FOMO, and fear of being too slow.

Is craftsmanship gone with AI? This excellent video goes into it: you can build something on demand, but you have no attachment to what you’ve built. So how are you gonna sell or rave about something you don’t even have any connection to? No hardship, no challenges, no learnings with AI.

Watch the video of I was a 10x engineer. Now I’m useless, or read Vibe coding and the death of craftsmanship.

This was also the message of PewDiePie’s video, Trains his own model, that he struggled so much that he learned so much. With vibe coding on auto-pilot, this is going away, fast.

AI making you Exhausted and potentially addicted.

AI agents don’t have souls, they have no characters. What’s the kick, the fun, the joy of it? This is also my take on Will AI Replace Human Thinking?, and how it is powerful and distractive at the same time, but lacking any depth.

Always be careful on Shallow Work vs real work you’re outsourcing to agents. Also highly related, Jevons Paradox, where the total cost of AI, because of everyone using it, is rising.

Some even say vibe coding is killing open source - see How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source that says:

Generative AI is changing how software is produced and used. In vibe coding, an AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software (OSS), often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers. We study the equilibrium effects of vibe coding on the OSS ecosystem. (check its Whitepaper)

Read more at Will AI Replace Human Thinking.

See How to Code with AI.

See Vibe Code Agents and AI IDE and AI Orchestrators.

As Daniel Kahneman said in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, it might happen the same to working with AI, but with «Building Fast, Thinking Slow».

Another way of saying the same would be to create taste, you need to think and Slow down - Kepano says:

Taste is a study of nuance, it requires slowing down. Kepano, LinkedIn

Built a full CRUD app in 40 minutes last week. Spent three hours the next day figuring out what it actually did. PromptSlinger

Yes! What happens to me is that the thinking is before, I use the plan mode and go forth and back extensively. And then what it builds, I “usually” understand if it’s a project of mine (not from scratch, but with the framework) and Claude built what I wanted.

But I think that’s only possible where I know the things.

What do you think?

• How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source | Hackaday. Check out its related paper AI Whitepapers.
• Self-Improving Software | Jeff Lunt
• AI Tooling and Open Source handling PRs in Apache Arrow
• The latest on Vibe Coding with Claude by Andrej Karpathy

Origin: LakeForge, Tweet