This one kicks off a deep dive into the murky waters of using AI tools in development work.
24 February, 2026
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I’m not a curmudgeon. Really. And I’m a pretty bad Boomer representative. But I do roll my eyes almost involuntarily at discussions of “Vibe Coding.”
Like so many things, this reaction varies dramatically with what people actually, for-realsies, mean by the term. This came to a head over the last few weeks, crystallizing with two things I encountered within about a week of each other (for some of you, both of these are “old news,” but I think the comparison is still current, relevant, and meaningful).
The first was an episode of Hard Fork, the somewhat-tongue-in-cheek New York Times tech podcast where its hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton each had independently used Claude to “vibe code” new websites over the holidays. Kevin’s is very clean, very direct, and has a fun Easter Egg that makes it look like a 1990s GeoCities site. Casey’s feels more “professionally designed.” Both seem fine, and not terribly different from what you might create with the same amount of time with WordPress Templates or SquareSpace or whatever.
But both sites were created “just vibing with Claude.”
Casey talks about adding functionality to the site. And how he asked Claude to add a subscription widget that allows visitors to sign up to Platformer, his monetized content platform. And he moves on quickly with how great it was that Claude could do that.
Except … it didn’t. Not really. Yeah, there’s a subscription box on Newton’s home page. But when you put your email in that box and hit subscribe, it … doesn’t. Instead, it pops you over to Platformer, where you have to re-enter everything if you actually want to subscribe.
So, vibe coding created something that looks vibish, but whose code would fail the most basic User Testing.
It’s, I guess, “good enough” to seem impressive at a glance. And that seems to be the actual bar for vibe coding in general. Which is … fine? I guess? I mean, a tool to create slick looking demos that have an approximate relationship to final products is useful, right?
Here’s the contrast. That same week, Boris Cherny, who is referred to as the creator of Claude Code, publicly shared how he uses the tool. (That attribution strikes me as weird, and likely a result of our need to believe that creation is a singular act–whatever, Cherny is clearly highly influential and deeply involved in making Claude possible, and he himself refers quite a bit to the team he works with.)
Cherny’s workflow is … totally opaque and incomprehensible if you don’t have a programming background. If you do, it all makes sense. But it ain’t vibe coding. It’s structured use of a tool that can automate, aggregate, and do long-form research, and it is all predicated on having the experience and insight to recognize the abstract patterns that form the bulk of software development work and then create triggers and commands within Claude to alleviate the impact of that repetitive, reproducible work.
You can find Cherny’s original posts on Threads here. (Yeah, it started on Twitter, but I don’t go there no more.)
It’s impressive–as you would anticipate–and it shines a light on how agentic AI can be used to dramatically reduce certain kinds of work, even if the total savings is eaten away at by the need to manage the orchestration of the agents, review their work, tweak them, etc.
And it’s about as far away from Hey, Claude, add a widget or Hey, Claude, can you add a button to make the site look like what we remember of GeoCities? as you can get.
This illustrates, for me, the gap vibe coding still cannot (and, I suspect, will never be able to) fill. Tools like Claude Code can be used to create things that look decent, and things that, at some low bar of testing and sophistication, work. But developers working on real projects aren’t using it that way. They’re using it to automate (see my prior post as well, Go Forth & Automate!), to tackle routine drudgery, to create more abstract, reusable patterns that apply across use cases.
And that can be fantastically impactful and transformational. But it ain’t vibes. It’s work. It’s good work, it’s worthwhile work, it’s the work of the present. Still, work.