For anyone who has managed to avoid the phrase, vibe coding refers to using AI to create software by describing what you want and then going from there.
I accidentally made a joke about vibe writing, imagining students who use AI to complete a project based on their ideas while working iteratively with the machine. Apparently I arrived late. Phil, writing at Phil’s Web Site, offers a better definition:
Freed from the syntactic constraints of code, take this opportunity to write about whatever you want! Open up a fresh Markdown file, or use the pen and paper from the previous exercise, and let your imagination run wild. You could tell an imagined audience about something you’ve thought or experienced, or perhaps arrange a series of words that sound cool when spoken aloud in a way that stirs emotion. You could even make up a completely fabricated story, featuring people who don’t even exist!
He is winking at us. I think.
Embrace the sarcasm, I say. Phil’s joke treats writing as a strange new technology that programmers might discover once AI has relieved them of programming.
Writing teachers already have names for much of this. Freewriting, sure. Exploratory writing as well.
Still, vibe writing catches something those older terms miss.
Freewriting usually begins with a temporary suspension of judgement. Keep the hand moving, ignore correctness. Follow the thought wherever it wanders. Vibe coding begins from a different arrangement: the human supplies an intention, the machine handles the formal construction, and the human responds to the result. A person may know what the program should feel like without knowing how to build it.
Vibe writing with AI could work the same way, I guess? The student supplies the subject, a few claims, perhaps a tone, and then keeps prompting until the prose resembles the paper that existed vaguely in their head.
Whether that work amounts to writing is where the trouble begins.
Writing involves more than having an idea and approving a representation of it, unless you’re a fussy actor using a ghostwriter.
Anyone who has tried to write down a supposedly clear thought knows how quickly the thought begins to deform. One claim contradicts another and your perfect little example proves less than expected. By the third paragraph, the original idea has, well, collapsed.
The irritation is part of the method, basically.
AI can remove some of that irritation. Sure, sometimes this is useful. Plenty of syntactic difficulty amounts to needless friction, particularly for writers working in an additional language or negotiating disabilities, anxiety, exhaustion, and so on. Nobody becomes intellectually stronger by spending forty minutes wondering whether however needs a semicolon.
But mess contains information. A paragraph that ends with “I dunno” may be doing more useful work for the student, and later the reader, than an apparently brilliant conclusion produced before the student has worked out what they think.
Revision still matters, of course, and readers should not have to excavate an argument from whatever happened to fall onto the page. But write the damn fragments. Follow the sentence that seems slightly embarrassing. Who knows, maybe it’s your best sentence. Just let the writing remain ugly for a while.
I have a more practical version of the argument in Writing with AI responsibly.