The Word

By Ricardo Vega

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I was in Austin at a conference, three or four weeks into being genuinely good at something new, and I made the mistake of naming it at lunch.

"Guys — have you heard of vibe coding?"

I have never been so thoroughly excommunicated by a table of people who liked me ten seconds earlier. Not argument. Not debate. Turned backs, and a particular look — the one reserved for someone who's revealed poor character rather than a poor opinion. I sat there with a calculator demo I'd been dying to show them, a whole working thing I could have built in front of them in four minutes, and there was no route back into the conversation.

They weren't wrong to react, and that's the part worth sitting with.

Vibe coding does generate sloppy code. Without guardrails it produces work that looks finished and isn't, that passes a demo and fails in production, that a junior developer will inherit and be unable to reason about. Every person at that table had been handed a pull request some enthusiast generated in an afternoon and could not explain. That's not prejudice. That's a scar.

And the term is a confession. Vibe. It announces up front that no rigour was applied. Half the people using the phrase mean exactly that.

So here's the crux. It does cause more problems than it solves — right now, in most hands, without discipline. That's true. It's also what every version one has ever done. The first automobiles were slower than horses over real distance and broke constantly, and everyone who said so in 1900 was describing the artefact accurately and the trajectory not at all. The first compilers produced code that assembly programmers mocked as bloated — and those programmers made precisely the argument my lunch table was making. You don't understand what the machine is doing. Something was lost. It just mattered less than what was gained.

The people best positioned to make this good are the ones most disgusted by it. The guardrails they're worried about the absence of — that's their expertise. Knowing what good architecture looks like. Knowing which failure modes hide until scale. My output got better that year not from better prompts but from thirty years of judgement finally applied to review instead of typing. And their disgust, well-earned as it is, is keeping them out of the room where the standards get set.

Back to the table. I couldn't hear a pin drop. And one developer across from me nodded, vigorously — like I'd said the cursed word out loud and he wanted me to know he'd heard it.

I told Mr. J the whole story afterwards. I'd been about to invite him. I'd shown him vibe coding weeks earlier, when I went to visit — we'd gone outside the hotel room, put some wine coolers and sensors in a trash can, opened our laptops, and coded for five hours. Some of the most fun either of us had had in years. His aversion to AI was never simple. It wasn't only the capital argument. It was personal — family pressure, a bad taste left behind that had nothing to do with the technology. And still, when I showed him, he looked honestly and stayed open. That's what I carried into that lunch, right before I got banished from the clan.

Fifty developers in that room. Three listened.

And in the weeks after, I realised I didn't care. Not out of spite. It stopped being about me.

I've lost jobs over things I put in a build that broke everything. I've built the wrong thing, confidently, more than once. I've made mistakes I'd be embarrassed to itemise. All of it is what pointed me at the mission, because it taught me what the real case for this is: if one person can help one person.

And it has to be free. That's not decoration on the idea, that is the idea. We can't gatekeep this. The moment you put a toll on it, you've rebuilt the thing that was in the way.

A friend of mine started vibe coding and built a VR anatomy concept that was genuinely fantastic. He works in academia. Someone came along and took it, and he went bitter. When I said we should be celebrating that he got to share it at all, he couldn't hear it.

Here's what I told him. That idea was never yours to begin with. If you can't execute it, it isn't yours — and holding onto it costs you more than losing it does. Especially if you're a creative, especially if your head runs like mine. Every hour spent trying to possess an idea is an hour taken from the thing you're actually for, which is making more of them.

So now when I have one, I blurt it out. Take it. Run with it. Think of me when you make it big.

And that's why I'd still drop the word. Not because they shamed me out of it — because "vibe" concedes the argument in its own name, and the argument matters too much to lose in four syllables. What I do isn't vibes. I know what I'm building, I read what comes back, I throw away far more than I keep, and I'm accountable for every line the same as I always was. The tool changed. The responsibility didn't.

I never did get to show them the calculator. It was never the point. Four minutes of demo proves speed, and speed was never their objection.

So if you're where I was — right about the direction, terrible at making the case — learn from it. Don't show them the speed. Show them the review. Show them what you threw away.

Because none of it is mine. They're echoes — the best of the people behind me, speaking through me. Everyone who lent me a hand and wanted nothing back. Everyone who lifted me up when I was completely lost. Everyone who was a lighthouse, whether they knew it or not.

So I consider myself bound. Blood-bound. Everything I do from here is how I give thanks to the people echoing through me — not with words about them, with actions. That's the only honour I have to offer, and offering it is a privilege rather than a debt.

And if anything I say lands on you, I don't want anything back either. But if it changes something, then you know how I feel — and you're bound the same way I am. Pass the echo on. It came from everyone behind us who wanted this world to be better, and it only stays alive if it keeps moving.

My actions are the echoes of thanks I give to the people who helped me along the way.