Introducing the vibe worker
AI isn't just automating tasks–it’s freeing our best thinking
Today, many people see AI as a tool primarily for automation, assuming it works best with structured, defined tasks. But the reality is quite different: AI is reshaping how we turn fuzzy intuitions into tangible, powerful ideas.
Your greatest notions are probably stuck in your head—too vague, too unstructured. Today’s AI will help you uncage them and turn them into reality.
Welcome to the world of the vibe worker.
If you are anything like me, vibes, half-baked thoughts based on snippets of evidence and tons of experience are constantly fizzing in your brain. They are inklings of ideas, essays to write, research to conduct, advice for a founder, new audiences to reach, new ways of doing things, gut feel, and judgment.
Vibes are the raw material of genius.
Historically, turning these vibes into something tangible—a detailed plan, a memo, a piece of code—has been a slog. That final 20% of clarity often demands 80% of the effort, as we wrestle our intuitions into structured form. But AI is changing that.
As LLMs improve, they’re becoming adept at deciphering our incoherent ramblings. You can throw a jumbled idea at them—“I want something that does this, kind of”—and they’ll figure out your real intention, delivering a workable starting point. It’s reminiscent of a parent interpreting a child’s babbling needs: it might sound fanciful, but it’s already happening. It is vibe working.
Here is a version one definition of vibe working:
Vibe working is using AI to turn fuzzy thoughts into structured outputs through iteration.
As with many work practices, distributed teams, asynchronous working, and agile, software developers have cottoned on to this early. “Vibe coding” is becoming a thing.
Here is Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s top AI developers:
It is talking to your computer and getting it to build something that works. Coding lends itself to all of vibing. The code that the AIs write works or doesn’t work. You can test and iterate rapidly.
If you want to go deeper,
has a good rundown of how to get started and some of the tools you need.Vibe workers of the world arise
While developers pioneered this approach, the vibe working revolution extends far beyond code. Knowledge work of all kinds, marketing, strategy, budgeting, planning, research, and analysis, are fertile terrain.
Here are some of the things I do:
A daily check-in to Claude on my morning drive. I tell Claude what is top of mind. These could be details of an upcoming trip, the next big analysis I’m working on, a business problem I’m trying to crack, or my shopping list. It’s often inchoate as the coffee hasn’t settled in yet. I return to my desk, and a list of items to pass to the team or work on myself is ready.