Vibe coding is not passive

After my weekend building Web Memo, I made a quiet assumption that turned out to be wrong. I thought the AI would do the thinking now, and I would just sit back and watch. A few months later, Andrew Ng said something that fixed my mistake.

The word that fools people

“Vibe coding” is the popular name for building software by talking to AI. The word makes it sound easy, like you kick back and accept whatever the AI types.

Ng warned against exactly that reading. The phrase, he said, “leads people to think, you know, like I’m just going to go to Vibes and accept all the changes.”

That is the trap. Accept everything, understand nothing, and you end up with a pile that looks like software right up until it meets the real world and falls over.

What it actually is

Ng’s better description stuck with me. It is “rapid engineering where AI is letting us build serious systems much faster than ever before. But it is engineering just done really rapidly.”

Engineering. Done fast. Not skipped.

The judgment is still yours. What to build. What good looks like. When the AI is plainly wrong. The AI types faster than you ever could. It does not decide better than you can.

I felt this in my own body

Ng said one more thing that made me laugh, because it was so true: “After a day of using AI assisted coding, I’m exhausted mentally.”

Yes. Exactly. My weekend on Web Memo had left me tired in a way I did not expect. Not from typing. From deciding. Hundreds of small calls, made fast, all day long. Is this right? Try that instead. No, go back. The machine was quick. The deciding was the work.

The bottleneck moved, it did not vanish

Here is the part people miss. AI did not remove the hard part of building. It moved the hard part.

The slow step used to be writing the code. Now the code is fast, and the slow step is good judgment, applied quickly, without a break. So the people who win with AI are not the ones who relax. They are the ones who bring sharp taste and clear thinking, and can keep it up at speed.

That changed how I work. I stopped trying to let the AI drive. I started treating it like the fastest junior engineer alive, one who still needs a sharp lead to follow. I am the lead. The vibe is real, but the work is engineering.

Why this shaped what I build now

Once I understood the work was judgment at speed, two questions got loud in my head. Where does my data go while I do all this. And does the tool actually fit the way I work.

I answer the first one next, because it became one of my firmest rules: Keeping my data in the room.