A month of vibe-coding at 0.01x velocity
The author describes a month spent "vibe-coding" at extremely slow pace (0.01x velocity), reflecting on the experience of building software with AI assistance when deliberately working far below normal speed. The piece critiques the rushed culture of AI development and explores what can be learned from slowing down the coding process to a crawl.
Background
- *Vibe coding* is a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025 for an extreme workflow where a programmer writes almost no code themselves, instead prompting an LLM (like Claude or ChatGPT) to generate entire features, then blindly accepting whatever it produces — "vibing" alongside the AI rather than reading or debugging.
- This article describes doing the *opposite*: vibe-coding at 0.01× velocity means deliberately slowing down to thoroughly read, understand, and hand-edit every line the AI outputs, which defeats the speed advantage but yields much higher quality.
- The piece reflects a backlash against the hype around AI-generated code by reminding readers that the AI is a junior co-pilot, not an expert; shipping sloppy generated code creates technical debt and security risks that compound faster than human-written mistakes.