Decoding the Vibe
Let's get on with it.
Are we at the beginning of a new wave where we are all “vibe coding” our lives? Using natural language to help build apps and write code, leaving the technical implementation to AI, is a behavior that is natural to the human condition. Ask any leader that wants to give their team a vision and north star leaving the individuals to figure out the hard parts. Delegation and verbalizing higher level ideas is easy. Figuring out how your ideas can become real and meaningful is quite another endeavor.
As we continue to barrel along an uncertain social-political global path, will we all begin to assemble agentic orchestration frameworks with AI agents strung together to do our bidding while we relax on the beach? Or will we not get as far as we are hoping?
All I know is that it is quite messy out there with individuals, agencies, and businesses all working to figure out what the normalization of AI will look like in the near future and how it will fundamentally change how we live, work, and interact.
The way I see it is that the individuals that are naturally open to adapting, shifting behaviors, and adopting new things are doing just fine. It's like the initial dot com boom. Certain folks are wired to see the unfolding future and are running toward it despite things being chaotic and somewhat half baked.
Personally I could not be more optimistic and excited about the next 5 years. I thrive in flux and uncertainty and have found it to be the ecosystem where exciting things grow and prosper. That said, I do know that things won’t be pretty.
Fewer minds think alike.
If the assumption is that agentic AI frameworks that are properly assembled will make efficient operational business workflows table stakes, then where does that leave the average person that does this work? They may simply become AI hall monitors, making sure the systems are working and our agents are behaving as they should.
I do believe there will be a polarization between technologically minded people that invest in understanding and implementing AI business workflows and management and those individuals that will remain in the more primitive Google Doc and list making mindset. As businesses grow they are often only as fast and the slowest members of the team.
If it takes five people to draft, implement, and collectively agree upon a new policy or directive, then that work will be only as efficient as the least knowledgeable members of the team regardless of AI augmentation.
For our eventual future state, I believe that having one or two people with a high level of critical thinking skills, a deep investment in their own ability of discernment, and a nuanced understanding of how AI agents can co-create their intention will be the ideal business “Pod.” Why? Because this recipe allows for both depth, clarity, and speed.
Insight in service of actioning
Groupthink is real. As is neocracy. Both often lead us astray in business and life. No matter the insight, incompletion is a central part of the human condition. Procrastination, false starts and the ever present divide between our intentions and desired outcomes are real and loom over all of our ambitions.
We are perpetually told that the journey is more rewarding than the destination. This phrase, often dismissed, if absolutely true. Learn. Risk. Grow. Build. My hope is that the deeper integration of AI agents into our behaviors will help us to do more and find more meaning. For me it's not about championing automaticity and shortcuts. It’s about using our access to more sophisticated ways to gain knowledge to think more critically with more depth and context to create more interesting things in life.
The key here is the doing. Progress is achieved brick by brick. One task at a time. It's unclear if AI behaviors will be adopted by everyone or even if they should. Like all enabling technology, there will be have and have nots. Early adopters and late bloomers.
To be sure, AI agents are here to stay and the behaviors needed to help augment your life for the better are on some level open ended. For me GTP4 is a companion. It’s my sidekick and it has made my work life infinitely more interesting and has made much of my work that requires critical thinking channeled into verbalized brainpower much much easier.
Is having good taste good enough?
In the world of lived experience, intention and good taste go a long way to make our life richer. For those that value nuance and sophistication, these qualities can boil done to the details of a good meal, the art direction and acting in an exceptional film, or the thread count of the sheets on your bed.
But knowing what good taste is is much different than achieving it. If more people can vibe code software and leave the complexity to AI, will this behavior of abstraction become the norm in other areas? Could we imagine a world where we are buying the “vibe” of an individual person or business and don’t really care how something is crafted or created?
I hope the opposite is true. As we operationalize AI to do more complex things like coding, my assumption is that good taste manifest in the the form of craft will continue to be valued and in many ways will rise up. For example, If AI will allow us to automate the entire automotive production pipeline, then what are you buying? What you are buying is aesthetics, story, taste, and craft. I look forward to the day when I might buy a solid state battery EV with a chassis crafted by Volvo and the body shell styling of a 1983 Porsche SC with Ricaro seats and sustainable bioengineered leather interior. A mashup of taste, aesthetics, and story all bound up in the thing you choose to like and find value in.
So decode your vibe and let's get on with it.
From across my desk
A recent article in Fast Company by Huge had a good distillation — our attention economy based on interest is being transformed into an intention one based on need.
R.J. Abbott LinkedIn post Taste is the new tech stack captures a compelling framing of taste in the age of AI.
Wildish & Co is an independent creative agency based in London spanning branding, campaigns and digital design and development. Lovely optimistic work.
Shameless self promotion
Support independent publishing. Check out my book A Visible Distance, Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design, as well as the other publications by Set Margins.
Check out my longer form writing on Medium. My Personal work on MattOwens.com and check out the brand innovation studio Athletics of which I’m a founder and partner.