On Vibe Coding

When AI/agent hype kicked off, vibe coding was all the rage. With a few lines of description, an agent could make a site or an app. People were stoked. You used to need to know how to code to make computers work for you. Now the power of telling a computer what to do was available to anyone.

Excitement raged, and then reality hit. Vibe coding a quick app to solve a personal problem is one thing. Building a resilient system and serving customers is another thing entirely. It didn't take long for people to realize why there are professional programmers. It takes knowledge and skill to create systems that are secure and work reliably. Also, people discovered that as much fun as it is to quickly make something, dealing with the long tail of bugs and fixes that comes with maintaining software is much less fun. It's why people pay for software — let someone else deal with all that stuff. It's why most of us don't change our oil despite it being a relatively simple task. We have other things to do.

As the hype died down, vibe coding found its place. Vibe coding is much like gesture drawings and studies in art. With a gesture, you capture the essence of a scene. You might have a particular focus — colour, composition, anatomy, etc. Vibe coding is the same. You chat with an agent to capture the essence of the app or site you want to build. Projects can be tiny, or they can be full apps. Little regard is given to the quality of the code. You trust it to the agent. You focus on exploring the experience.

Once you've vibe coded your idea into existence, the code the agent generated can be used to capture the requirements and user experience for a more deliberate build. At Loam Studios, we use vibe coding in our Product Therapy sessions. Before agents, we created whiteboard sketches or mockups to capture an idea. Now, we can sketch in code. Most of us need to use an app to decide what's working. Vibe coding accelerates our learning and thinking by letting us express our ideas in code without worrying too much about how the thing is built. When it comes time to build, we can ask an agent to use all those ideas as we begin to make a more refined, maintainable version.