Featured termA fresh pick each visit
Vibe working
- Vibe Work
- Practitioner slang
Vibe working is using AI for knowledge work, such as reports, emails, slides, and analysis, by steering the finished-looking result while its sources, methods, and reasoning go mostly unchecked.
A model writes in the same confident, polished style whether its figures are right or wrong, so the look of a draft says little about its accuracy. Each round of polish makes it look more finished still, which makes checking it feel less necessary.
Where you’ll meet it
You're turning last quarter's sales export into a report for your manager with an AI assistant. Over an hour you ask for a sharper summary, a cleaner chart, and a more confident tone. It looks ready to send, and you haven't yet compared a single total with the export.
What to do
Before sending, list the figures the report rests on, such as the totals behind its recommendation. Ask the assistant to show the calculation for each one, then redo two or three of them on the export yourself in a spreadsheet. Fix or cut any figure you can't reproduce.
Easy to mix up
| Vibe working | Workslop |
|---|---|
| Yes, even in notes only you will use | No, it takes a coworker who has to act on it |
Check yourself
Your team's AI drafts the monthly spending summary from the accounting system's data. Before it goes out, someone asks the AI to double-check every figure, and it replies that all of them are correct. Is the team still vibe working?
Go deeperTools can make a document's hidden parts checkable
The term is informal, modeled on vibe coding, building software by judging only whether it seems to work, which Andrej Karpathy named in early 2025.
Source links on each figure, formulas left visible in a spreadsheet, and labels on claims that are estimates let the next reader test the numbers a decision depends on, without redoing the work.