Please Stop Saying "Vibe Coding"
You're selling yourself short.
Imagine you’re sitting in a conference room at the head of the table. Around the table are several legendary coders who work at the speed of light. They absolutely love coding, but more importantly, they’re here to help you with the app you’re building and your new website.
Whenever you have a new idea or a question, your team is ready to enthusiastically jump in.
“I’d like the webpage to feel warmer and more welcoming,” you say. The group immediately gets to work and quickly presents you with their best interpretation of “warmer and more welcoming.” You like it, but it’s not quite right yet.
“Let’s try using more earthy colors, maybe more greens and browns and dark reds.”
The team gets back to work, making the next version of these ideas a reality.
As you iterate, someone comes by and looks at all of you through the long conference room window. What do they see? Or, how would they describe what they see? Vibing?
No. Not in a million years. They’d say you were directing a team in a project. Expressing a vision as a creative leader.
How come, then, if we replace that room of coders with AI tools, all of a sudden you’re a vibe coder?
Just Vibing?
I find the term “vibe coding” reductive of all the creative work you’re actually doing when you’re coding with AI.
When someone says “I vibe coded this,” it sounds like they’re saying “I typed in a few prompts, didn’t understand what came back, went and got a hot dog on the beach, and somehow ended up with an app.”
Tell me — when you’ve worked with AI to create something, do you feel like you’re just vibing? I bet you feel like you’re working pretty hard to get what’s in your brain onto the digital page.
You’re making decisions, making revisions, trying out new ideas, and iterating over and over. Yes, you may still experience vibe in the sense of playing and exploring your idea. The creative process will always involve feel and gut instinct. I would never advocate against that.
But this new term doesn’t capture that creative toil in a way that truly respects it. There’s an undercurrent that you have no idea what you’re doing. And why? Because the code came from natural language and not directly from your fingertips?
The implication is that the millions of creatives, newly enabled to make digital things, are just vibing around. As if they’d have no idea how to apply their methods and perspectives to a new medium. I’m not buying it.
Dark Mode
It’s known that those who spent a lifetime learning to code are under threat by AI. This is obvious, and reasonable, and something I feel immense sympathy toward. You hardly hear “learn to code” anymore.
Here’s a darker frame to what’s going on: we’re witnessing a priestly class losing control over their set of exclusive skills, while at the same time those skills are becoming commoditized.
Outsiders are able to do the thing previously reserved for the insiders. It almost feels like cheating, doesn’t it? Who are these people showing up typing natural language into a magic box? They don’t know what they’re doing!
Now those outsiders are getting a heavy dose of impostor syndrome. You’ve never written a line of code in your life and now you’re scripting API calls in Airtable? Building an iOS app? Designing a website? Who are you anymore?
“How can I consider myself an app designer when I don’t even know how to code?”
We’re in a transitionary era, and I think the term vibe coding has sprouted from this ambiguous space. In the absence of a cultural shift, the act of creation today is still code-centric. So, if you’re making something and don’t know how to code, you must be a vibe coder.
But you’re not a vibe coder
You’re a creator. The term completely neglects all the other work that goes into creating something.
Those moments where you feel like your idea will never work…and then you get a flash of insight. Those moments at a dinner where someone explains a problem they’re having in their life and you think of a solution for it. The weeks and weeks of play testing a game to fine-tune it perfectly.
You’re not just doing it by feel. You’re experiencing the entire creative journey, as humans have for millennia.
You Made That!
If you’re working on something with AI, do me a favor, don’t say you’re a vibe coder, and definitely don’t say “I vibe coded this app.”
Say “I created this app” or “I built this app.” Because it’s the truth.
I’ll go first.
I’m currently building a mobile game. I’ve actually designed dozens of games when I owned an escape room, but I always felt locked out (no pun intended) of being able to design games for a digital medium.
Now I don’t. Even with Claude Code and the Unity MCP, I’ve still gotten stuck on hard problems that required my own imagination to solve. These tools can’t tell me if the game is fun, or if my art is cute enough, or if level 10 is too hard. It’s challenging, meaningful work to bring something out of thin air into existence, and it’s a creation I’m proud of even though I didn’t write a single line of code.
And I hope millions of people download it and have a ton of fun.
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You can check out my previous posts about the fundamental shift happening in Airtable, Airtable automations, and how to start fixing what’s broken.