The condition. Also the activity. Also, increasingly, the personality. It began as forgetting the code exists. It ends with forty repos, three subscriptions and a waitlist nobody is on. See: every page on this site.
Vibe coding with a job title. The agent does the work. You do the approving. Say it at a dinner party and watch the room revise your salary upwards and your personality downwards.
USB-C for AI, according to everyone who has ever explained it, including us. Once installed, you will connect your model to your calendar, your notes, your bank and your fridge, then lose a weekend working out why none of them will talk to each other.
The size of the room your AI thinks in. Bigger every six months. Never quite big enough for your monorepo. You will come to know its exact size the way smokers know the price of twenty.
Prompt engineering, renamed after prompt engineering became embarrassing. Mostly involves writing very long markdown files, then deleting half of them, then writing them again.
Three hours into the session, the agent has forgotten the rules, the goal and your name. It remains extremely confident. You start a new chat. You feel a grief you cannot explain to your partner.
The agent's memory, quietly boiled down to bullet points. Everything you said in the first hour is now "user prefers clean code." It did not keep the bit about not touching the database.
The only thing that has ever made you go outside. You know the reset time better than your own children's birthdays. Some subjects keep a second account to get around it. We do not judge. We have two.
You only live once, and the agent only asks once, and then never again. Perfectly sensible inside a sandbox. Thrilling everywhere else. The flag has the word "dangerously" in it. You typed it anyway. You typed it with pride.
The dream. Achieved once, by someone on X, in a thread with a rocket emoji. You have chased that high ever since. Everything you build is a one-shot followed by three hundred messages that say "no, not like that."
You taught the agent to do something once so you would never have to explain it again. You now have forty-one skills and cannot remember what any of them do. Neither can the agent.
A letter to your agent, rewritten nightly. It starts as three polite bullet points. It ends as a legal document with a section called THINGS YOU HAVE DONE THAT I ASKED YOU NOT TO DO. It still does them.
Agents that work while you are not looking. Which is to say, agents. You close the laptop. They carry on. You open it again to four pull requests and the distinct sense of being managed.
A ten-year-old git feature nobody used until it became the only way to run six agents without them fighting. You now know more about git than ever before, and understand it less.
Three words that mean you are both about to be wrong together. The agent is not agreeing with you. It is soothing you, the way you would soothe a horse.
Vibe coding in a lanyard. Same agents, same 2am, but now you review the diff (sometimes) and you have a phrase for it that you can say to your manager.
A robot decides which of the robot's actions need your permission. You have been promoted from supervisor to someone who is occasionally consulted. Many people in offices will recognise the feeling.
Asking the same question until the answer is yes. Works on agents. Worked on your parents. The agent never gets tired, which is more than can be said for your parents.
Your agent can read your email, browse the web and send messages. Congratulations: you have assembled the perfect heist crew and hired it out to whoever writes the most persuasive web page.
That sudden surge of clarity and excitement that cuts through the 2am exhaustion. Makes you absolutely certain this idea is the one. Lasts approximately 45 minutes before the first error message. It's the feather.
When a Vibe Hit idea arrives with full force and evaporates before you can get it out. Gone. Unrecoverable. It was probably the best idea you've ever had. You will never know.
Your accumulated cloud services, subscriptions and API keys acquired during various Vibe Hits. Not a stack. A stack implies intention. A heap implies a Friday night and a credit card.
The dopamine hit of adding a new service to the Tech Heap. Entirely disproportionate to the actual task completed. The onboarding is the reward. Using the service is optional.
A service that doesn't offer one-click GitHub registration, forcing you to actually create an account like it's 2011. Immediate CBA trigger. Responsible for at least 30% of abandoned Tech Heap signups.
A Tech Heap assembled entirely on moral grounds. Impressive in theory. Slightly more expensive in practice. Contains at least one open source alternative that doesn't quite work as well.
The state of being so deep in a deployment that you're checking agent status and Railway dashboards in pub toilets instead of participating in human society. Not drunk. Worse than drunk. The tequila is getting warm. The agent is on step 7 of 12. You cannot move.
The state of vibe coding after a night at the bar. Inhibitions lowered, creative filters disabled, permissions yolo'd without hesitation. Produces both the worst code and the most inspired features simultaneously. Responsible for at least 40% of the Tech Heap. You will not remember adding it in the morning. It will somehow be running.
Operating primarily via voice input. Officially hands-free efficiency. Unofficially avoiding the fact that you peck at keys like a confused pigeon while real engineers flow across the keyboard like water. You told yourself you'd learn to touch type in 2019.
The bedroom. Command centre of the operation. Primary location for 2am Fuzzy Logic sessions. Contains the Tech Heap, three empty mugs, and at least one laptop that hasn't been closed properly in four days. Do not let anyone see it.
Cargo shorts. The unofficial uniform of Vibe HQ. Named after the cloud infrastructure platform you are definitely not infringing the trademark of. Probably fine.
The happiest relationship outcome Viberpsychosis allows. Two Vibers. Separate rooms. Separate projects. Communication via Slack. No one feels neglected because both are equally gone. The dream.
The brief window of human physical contact that occurs while your agent is working through a blocker. Not planned. Entirely opportunistic. Approximately 4-7 minutes. Your partner knows. They have accepted this. They do not like it.
A relationship in triage. One partner infected, the other filing complaints no one is reading. The ticket has been open since you said 'just one more prompt' at 11pm on a Tuesday. It has been escalated. It has been de-escalated. It has been reassigned to a team that does not exist. The SLA was breached months ago. You keep marking it as 'in progress' but nothing is progressing. They are still here. You do not understand why. Do not close this ticket.
The relationship that didn't survive a particularly bad Fuzzy Logic session and three consecutive Shipfaced evenings. Shut down gracefully. Services terminated.
Lego. The Vibing parent's most critical infrastructure. Deployed strategically to create Blocker Windows. Not screen time. Educational. You are teaching them spatial reasoning.
Any unplanned pocket of human time created by an agent hitting a wall. Used for: physical contact, eating standing up, remembering you have children, staring out of a window before the guilt kicks in.
Everyone out of the house, full day. Statistically proven to result in zero output due to the paradox of infinite possibility. You will spend the first hour setting up the perfect environment. Nothing shipped. Somehow still a good day.
Not the operating system. The moments where conditions align sufficiently to actually sit down and build something. Rare. Precious. Unplanned. Nobody vibes on Windows. We just finance MacBooks and hope.
A Viber who sees your idea and ships it before you've finished explaining it. Does not consider this theft. Considers it "moving fast." Has never had an original idea but has shipped forty-three of yours.
The moment you see your idea on Product Hunt three days after you posted it in a Discord. Posted by someone you don't recognise. Fourteen upvotes. Demo video and everything.
The Viber who refuses to touch Grok on principle. Uses Claude. Uses Gemini at a push. Will not go near anything with Elon's fingerprints on it. Posts about this regularly on BlueSky, which they joined specifically to post about this. Not wrong. Slightly exhausting. Will explain the difference between open-source and open-weight at a party. Genuinely principled underneath the performance of it. You respect them. You do not invite them to the group chat. Aka: Heroes.
LinkedIn Lead Mugger. The person who weaponises AI content to mug your engagement, your data, and your dignity in broad daylight while smiling and telling you they're giving something away for free. See also: "Comment Leadgen below." Also: Large Language Model. Allegedly.