I’ve been tinkering with Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Lovable and other GenAI tools for a few personal projects. And I landed on a couple of realizations:

  1. It’s scary good

Scary good how it can get you from idea to mockup in minutes, purely through natural language prompts. Especially if you use the agent mode to apply code changes directly.

I was able to generate a mockup of the basic features I wanted in a web app exactly as I had in mind. We’re going to see the time from idea to mockup shrink dramatically (it’s already happening). This is giving creatives, designers, makers and entrepreneurs so much more power to express themselves. It’s reminiscent of the “bicycle for the mind” metaphor, except it’s much more than a bicycle.

  1. It’s scary bad

Scary bad how it can lead you down an endless loop of misery and frustration if you don’t know what you are doing.

After the basic mockup, I tried testing how far I could push it, and kept going: ”Now I want XYZ”, “Add this too”). Still through natural language prompts and still relying on the agent to apply changes without my intervention. I found that this would often result in some correct changes being applied but something else breaking in the process (even things that were already working in the mockup). Now if I had slowed down, added one feature at a time, and asked for more clarity on how to implement each step before proceeding, I’m sure I’d have had better results.

A few observations for vibecoding

  • Go full steam ahead if you want to get from idea to mockup or prototpye
  • For better, more reliable results on more complex projects, embrace friction and go in small increments.
  • Sound prompt engineering practices do make a difference. This means being as clear and detailed as possible with requirements: context, caveats, constraints. Not just in crafting the best prompts to get things done on autopilot but also in knowing when to slow down, take the wheel for bit and prompt with caution.
  • Good ideas will still be valued, as starting points for products, and will be critical in standing out from AI slop
  • Those with technical skills, deep conceptual understanding and experience will still be valued, especially when things break and someone has to step in to fix stuff.

Anyway, my point being: I do feel the vibes.

Image: Generated from Sora. (Not too bad actually!)