Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of highly complex AI-generated code, often with the intention that the code will not be read by humans. It has cast quite a spell on the tech industry. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much of their code must be AI-generated or risk poor performance reviews. Software developers worry that everyone around them is a “10x developer” and that they’ve fallen behind. College students wonder if it is worth studying computer science now that AI has automated coding. People of all career stages hesitate to invest in their own career development. Won’t AI be able to do their jobs for them anyway a year from now? What is the point? I work at an AI company, and we use AI every day. AI is useful! However, we approach vibe coding with caution and have seen that much can go wrong. The results of vibe coding have been far from what early enthusiasts promised. Well-known software developer Armin Ronacher powerfully described some of the issues with AI coding agents. “When [I first got] hooked on Claude, I did not sleep. I spent two months excessively prompting the thing and wasting tokens. I ended up building and building and creating a ton of tools I did not end up using much… Quite a few of the tools I built I felt really great about, just to realize that I did not actually use them or they did not end up working as I thought they would.” Armin titled his post “agent psychosis”. The term “psychosis” is a strong label. What is it about this technology which could be trapping such productive and experienced developers? The reason may be similar to the addictive qualities of gambling, a sinister under-current of the normally positive state of flow. Not all Focus is Flow When coding or doing other creative work, many of us experience a state of flow: full absorption and energized focus. This concept was first formalized by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. In his 1990 best-selling book, he described flow as “a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.” There are activities that can produce feelings of absorption and engaged focus that don’t meet this positive definition of flow. Consider gambling. A key aspect of flow is that the challenge faced be reasonably matched to the person’s skills. “Roulette players develop elaborate systems to predict the turn of the wheel,”Csikszentmihalyi writes of how gamblers often believe their skills are playing a significant role, even in games governed entirely by chance. Another key aspect of this kind of flow is that the activity should provide “clear clues as to how well one is performing.” The makers of modern slot machines have gone to great lengths to do the opposite, creating the…