Full text also available here:

“Higher-Order Vibes” Are Killing the Vibe Coding Industry

I used to be a 10x vibe coder. A prompt artisan with five years of vibe experience on my CV.

My job was to whisper sweet nothings into our company’s overpriced ChatGPT wrapper. We shipped MVPs one after the other. It was good.

Then, word came out about “Higher-Order Vibes”: Prompts which coax AIs to act like vibe coders. Some Satoshi-wannabe released the whitepaper anonymously, and it became the talk of every CTO.

It was a replacement. A dehumanizing monstrosity which stood against everything I vibed for.

My first day with HOV, I gave it a hand-crafted prompt for a meditation app. Then, it responded:

Prompt too detailed. Over-specified. Try to feel it more. I’ll take it from here.

Then it generated the app. It was perfect. Better than anything I could have put into wishful words. It even wrote a 500-word monologue explaining how the vibes it used were “immaculate” and that “humans do not belong within them.”

Technical Details

For those who've been living under a rock for the past two months, vibe coding is a technique in which you describe to an AI the app you want, and the AI gives you the app:

collapsed inline media

In short, vibe coding kick-started an era in which humans could make computers do new things, rather than the stuff they’d been hard-wired to do at the factory or through installed “software” (another word for “apps”).

Now, this is what CEOs want:

collapsed inline media

I cannot overstate the need to protect our art — an achievement of human ingenuity — from the cold hands of automation. If we give up the fight now, we might suffer the same fate as the programmers of old.

We’re about to lose the human right to make computers go “beep boop,” no matter what “beep boop” is to you.

Closing Thoughts

Let this be a warning. Our craft, our vibing age, is coming to an end.

I might go down — that I know. But you know what? I’ll never stop vibing. They can’t take that away from me.

I’ll vibe for fun. I’ll vibe at home. I’ll vibe in public, there’s no shame in that. I’ll vibe at the gym, I’ll vibe with my bros. Vibe me once, you can’t vibe me away.

Choose vibe.