Speaking things into existence

Welcome to the age of vibe working, where desks no longer define our work, and rhythm becomes the new routine

IN THE AGE of AI, many are wondering what the future of work is. The answer? It’s vibe working, bro. Duh.

 No joke. ‘Vibe working’ is becoming a real and prominent way of working in the professional world. You might’ve heard of ‘vibe coding’ — computer coding using an AI tool to write the code that produces the product the user envisions, with the main advantage being you don’t need to learn to code. Well, it’s now moving beyond coding.

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In September, Microsoft rolled out its vibe working suite of tools in Excel and Microsoft Word. “In the same way that vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts,” they wrote.

In short, you create through prompting. Writers need not write, coders need not code, illustrators need not illustrate. Let the clanker handle the hard stuff, you worry about the overall vibe.

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“More of the corporate world is vibing,” wrote Amanda Hoover at Business Insider. There are Chief Vibes Officers, and the term has become a common corporate shorthand for using generative AI to do the tedious and strenuous parts of a project. “It also conveys the idea that work is free flowing, improvised and easy,” Hoover added.

While this risks generating some ‘workslop,’ don’t be too quick to dismiss it — the ability to vibe work is probably one of the first real transformative effects of AI on the way people work. Vibe working is becoming a marketable skill like any other, one that might most resemble the work of an editor. “I came to see that the most productive form of AI-assisted coding may be an editorial one,” wrote The Verge’s Sheon Han. “A vibe coder — a responsible one, that is — must assume a kind of editorship. Through a volley of prompts — like successive rounds of edits — the editor-coder minimized the delta between their vision and the output.”

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In the end, it’s still work, and it’s not always easy. “I imagine to this particular demographic of people, that’s very appealing: work being about vibing more than it’s about analyzing or synthesizing or reporting, which I don’t think sounds particularly artistic or creative or collaborative or beautiful,” said Carnegie Mellon University’s Emily DeJeu.

So, while it may be different, that shouldn’t be confused with it being easy or less valuable. “Labour is labour,” summed up DeJeu, “and the labour to build expertise is labourious.” Kieran Delamont