Vibe working
- 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 polished draft can contain wrong figures as well as right ones. Revising only tone and layout does not check where claims came from, and can make an unchecked draft feel ready to use.
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
Ask the assistant to show the source and calculation for the figures behind its recommendation. Start by reproducing two or three in the original export yourself, then check the remaining figures you will rely on. Fix or remove any result you can't support.
Easy to mix up
Workslop needs a second person, who receives the document and inherits the missing checking. Vibe working can happen with no one else involved, even in notes only you will use.
Check yourself
Your team's AI drafts a monthly spending summary from accounting data. Asked to double-check, it says every figure is correct but shows no comparison with the accounting records. Is that enough to move beyond 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, visible spreadsheet formulas, and labels distinguishing estimates from observed values let the next reader trace the claims. They make checking possible without reconstructing every hidden step; they do not establish that the claims are correct.
Sources
- Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding, simonwillison.net