I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code? | WIRED

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The dog that ushered me into the technological future was “low and thick.” That’s all my mother registered before it T-boned her in a city park earlier this year: dense, heavy, and traveling fast enough to fracture her right tibia. But enough about her. Let’s discuss what this set in motion in my life: Having successfully learned nothing about coding for two and a half decades, I would soon be attempting my very first software development project.

If you’ve ever had a low and thick dog break your mom’s shin bone, you know the stream of lesser indignities that follows. Case in point: the hours my father spent navigating phone trees, trying to manage my mom’s medical care. Are frustrating telephone calls significant in the grand scheme of things? No. But that stupid dog had chosen a technologically interesting moment to do its thing. For the first time in history, a problem no longer needed to be serious to bring serious tools to bear.

For as long as Silicon Valley has been selling a frictionless tomorrow, we ordinary people have been its passive shoppers—scrolling the App Store, hoping someone has gone to the trouble of building whatever we need. Enter AI and its democratizing sidekick: vibe coding. If the promise is real, suddenly we can build our own apps, as niche and trifling as we please, with zero programming skills. We merely gesture toward whatever irks us and a constellation of large language models, code generators, and development environments will click their heels.

Illustration: Yann Bastard

Niche and trifling? That’s me! Where others vibe code résumé reviewers and inventory trackers and automated assistants to boost their work productivity, I had a different target in mind. Over the past couple years I’ve grown particularly fixated, personally and professionally, on what the policy world calls sludge: the rising tide of tiny administrative obligations that increasingly seems to define modern existence—and corrode our ability to get anything done. The hassle of dealing with insurance, or connecting that insurance to your doctor, or staying on top of airline miles, or navigating your kid’s school portal. The steps required to dispute a charge, or unsubscribe from a streaming service you forgot you had. Each of these feels like its own discrete assault on our time. But they’re not discrete. They’re separate mushrooms sprouting from the same mycorrhizal network.

In a way this is a calibration issue. While bigger problems might at least theoretically attract attention—legislation, journalism, a Senate hearing—the smaller ones, too petty to litigate, simply become a fact of life. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but when it comes to fighting a one-dollar bank fee, it bends toward hold music.

Which is where the fantasy of vibe coding captured my attention. Those hassles aren’t just accidental byproducts of complexity; they’re often features. A confusing portal, a dropped call, a process just opaque enough to discourage follow-through. At scale, they function less like bugs than like policy. The app I envisioned would expose this phenomenon, make the cumulative weight of these obligations a little harder to ignore. The image I’d like you to summon is a field of mushrooms trembling.

What my mom lacks in healthy legs, she makes up for in a Claude Pro subscription. Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.

I’d like to create a communally shared app that gathers and shares information related to how much time and energy we devote to fighting burdensome administrative tasks, bureaucratic sludge, Kafka-esque unsubscribe mazes, byzantine insurance portals, wrongful charges, denied claims, confusing membership plans, and the like.

With as much clarity and detail as I could muster, I proceeded to describe a dashboard that would record the scale and scope of our collective sludge. Users would log frustrating incidents from their lives, entering how much time they’d spent, how annoying it was, and what they’d rather have been doing. Every submission would be dopaminally rewarded with an inspiring resistance quote and a photo of a kitten, puppy, or baby chimp. I’d train Claude to generate some “wider context”—a paragraph discussing how the frustrating incident fits into systemic sludge patterns—and a complaint letter to the relevant regulatory bodies.

Claude noodled. Not for the first time, I feared my vibes would simply manifest an error page. I recalled, dimly, some of the advice I’d seen in Reddit forums: “I’d learn how computers and code works first.” “I’d look into going through harvards CS50.” “Instead of learning AWS or servers, use something like Kuberns.” I began to worry that vibe