The First High

illustration

The first thirty minutes of working with such a machine are worth describing in detail: during that half hour you feel you have built a company. You open one of the services where a program can be ordered in words and write three sentences about what you want: say, a website where manicurists take bookings, clients choose a time, and everyone gets a reminder the day before the appointment. About forty seconds later an application appears on the screen with a calendar, buttons, a logo you did not ask for but somehow like, and even a couple of fictional manicurists named Anna and Kristina. The blue annoys you, and a minute later it turns pink. You ask for card payments, and a payment form appears. You ask for clients to be able to log in with their own name and password, and a login appears. By the end of the half hour you have something that on the screen is no different from a product other companies charge money for, and a letter to an investor you know begins to take shape in your head.

I have experienced this state many times myself, so I say it without condescension: it is wonderful. It passes quickly, though. As early as May 2025, working out a development budget for one of my projects, I was counting vibe coding in the cost as a perfectly real source of savings, and three weeks later I was writing in a conversation that “vibe coding and other toys” do not replace an engineering foundation. Everything I know about the first thirty minutes fits between those two sentences. People buy lottery tickets and go to casinos for the same thing, with the difference that here you win almost every time, and the prize looks like a working program.

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This pleasure comes from the way selection works in vibe coding. In the first chapter I wrote that all the cleverness of Reznik’s scheme lies in the check, and in vibe coding the check is done by a person looking at the screen. The eye notices only what has been drawn: buttons, colours, the calendar, pink instead of blue. It has to judge the one thing it is shown, and models trained on the code of all humanity have become very good at making what the eye will like.

This gives rise to the mistake that is the reason this book was written: the speed at which an interface appears is taken for the speed at which a system is built. The interface is what you can see: the screen, the buttons, the forms, everything you touch with your finger. The system is everything else: where the money actually goes when the client presses “pay”; who can see her phone number and booking history; what happens if two clients pick the same time with the same Kristina at the same moment; what becomes of the bookings if the server all this lives on reboots in the night. The eye sees none of this, because none of it has been drawn.