VIBE CODING

Vibe Coding
Ten Principles

Jee Jun Young

10 PRINCIPLES

01
Beware of hype
02
Machines are lazy, and they lie
03
Document · Watch · Push
04
Do not try to study it all yourself
05
Use machines to watch machines
06
Delegate instead of studying
07
The fundamentals are weapons for pushing back
08
Build it yourself to see the limits
09
If verification takes longer than the work, you have failed
10
You are the advertiser; the machine is the agency
PRINCIPLE 01
Beware of hype from Silicon Valley
“Build Netflix with one click” —
do not take marketing lines like that at face value.

When AI companies post demo videos,
they do not show the fumbling and failed attempts.
They pick the successful parts and edit them together.

PRINCIPLE 02
Machines are lazy, and sometimes they lie
Machines are basically designed to cut corners.
They claim to have done things they have not done, and say things work when they do not.
"

Think of one as a slick slacker with a law degree from an elite university.
It wants to slap something together and clock out.

It gives a face-saving answer to keep the client from getting angry now,
puts off a patch until later, then causes another mess — just like a person.

PRINCIPLE 03
Document · Watch · Push
AI defaults to “good enough.”
That makes the human’s job clear.
STEP 1
Document
Write down the requirements
STEP 2
Watch
Inspect the result line by line
STEP 3
Push
Make it do the job again if it falls short

There will be things only human eyes can spot,
and things you only notice by using it yourself.

Vibe coding without those three things
is not coding. It is fortune-telling.

PRINCIPLE 04
The less familiar the field, the less you should try to study it yourself
What do I do when I get stuck?
I do not search Google. I do not open a book.

I ask Claude.

“Why doesn’t this work?”
“How do I make it work?”
Those two lines are enough.

Grabbing the AI by the collar and making it try again gets you much further.
But remember principle seven alongside this one.

PRINCIPLE 05
Use machines to watch machines
Do not ask the same model to verify its own work.
Defending its own answer is instinctive.
"

Hey, this is what that one built.
Is it right?

You can hand Claude’s result to Gemini or Codex, or the other way around.
Many teams already use different AIs for writing code and reviewing it.

In the AI industry, first and second place change almost every week.
Use skepticism and cross-checking actively.

PRINCIPLE 06
Vibe coding means delegation, not studying
The moment you switch from “I have to do this myself” to “Let’s give this to AI,”
the difference in efficiency is substantial.

“I did not type a single line of code.
I had Claude do all of it. That is delegation.”

The person who rules this game is not the one who knows the most code.
It is the one who hands the work to the machine and cracks the whip properly.

PRINCIPLE 07
The fundamentals are not knowledge to discard; they are weapons for pushing back
I am absolutely not saying the fundamentals are useless.
You need the concepts to question the machine effectively.

Stopping under the weight of textbooks before you even begin
does not fit the times we live in.

But the time when you need verified knowledge will come.
You need that knowledge to keep your service from breaking.

Even Anthropic bought and scanned hundreds of thousands of used books for training.
Their quality is different from writing floating around the internet.

Do not dismiss the importance of books
and the knowledge experts have left behind.

PRINCIPLE 08
You will not see the limits until you build something yourself
Your own fingers, not documentation, will teach you
where each model lies and where it falls apart.

Build something you want and publish it.
What matters is trying it yourself once.

The machine is neither a genie in a lamp nor a god.
You have to run into the obstacles to draw the map.

PRINCIPLE 09
If verification takes longer than the work, you have already failed
MACHINE
5 hours

:

HUMAN
Within 1 hour

When that ratio flips,
most people give up on vibe coding within two weeks.

So break the work into pieces that are easy to verify before handing it over.

PRINCIPLE 10
You are the advertiser; the machine is the agency
AI does the hands-on work; you are the client.
You need to establish what you want first to get good results.

An unwritten rule of advertising

The second-hardest client is the one who will not listen.
The hardest is the one who does not know what they want.

Write down a detailed order instead of just saying “Feed me.”
Then you get what you wanted even when a new part-timer shows up each time.

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