The ability to pivot on a dime like this and effortlessly try out a completely new direction is astonishing. Small experiments and whimsical curiosities can be indulged and tested without expending significant time or effort.
My 4 takeaways from vibecoding
This first experience of a few hours of vibecoding left me with 4 takeaways:
- Learning to code is now optional
- The new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s saved
- Software is the new frontier of book publishing
- We’re entering a more impressionistic era of creation
Learning to code is now optional
Over the years, I’ve considered whether I should build an app many times. I live in the world of tech and software, and in many ways, the ability to create a new software tool is the pinnacle of agency in that world.
Yet every time, I’ve decided not to pursue building an app, either because I lacked the time to learn it myself, or didn’t want to spend the thousands of dollars it seemed to require to even build something basic.
But now, in a matter of hours and at almost zero cost, I can build something that’s genuinely useful. I didn’t learn anything about coding, but I think that’s overall a good thing. Learning can be fun and is certainly useful, but it isn’t always inherently good or necessary.
Why should the ability to leverage software be limited to those willing to spend months or years studying arcane details of technical implementation? Why should someone’s vision or mission require them to know the low-level details of how a webpage gets rendered? And now, nearly all of the details are “low-level.”
Learning coding is now optional, but I think AI tools will also make it easier to learn to code for those who decide they want to. At any point, you can bring in context from any part of the codebase and ask the AI to explain it to you at any level of detail you want. You can even have it explain things outside that environment, such as the many external systems and interfaces you’ll need to get a full-fledged website working.
This is such a remarkable level of accessibility for a technology that was previously very hard to use, and it’s difficult to predict how the world will change when everyone can wield the power of software.
The new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s saved
It’s so fast to create and edit code this way that the bottleneck starts to become how fast you can move your mouse, the speed of your internet connection, how long it takes to deploy a new build, the speed of refreshing the page, etc.
I predict we’ll see a variety of efforts to speed up every little step involved in coding, the same way that factories once invested millions in reducing the time it took to switch a production line from one activity to another, as that became the bottleneck.
But more broadly, the true limiter on the quality of software that people will be able to produce using Cursor and similar tools is how they spend the time that AI frees up for them.
You could spend it chilling by the pool or watching TV, but you have to remember that everyone else is also having all their time freed up, so the level of competition will increase like a rising tide. Many web apps that people will build this way are hobbies, or experiments, or complements to other projects. Still, many will have some kind of competition or alternative, and the only way to compete effectively will be to invest the time saved in new dimensions of quality.
Maybe you spend that time exercising and meditating, so that you can ground yourself and bring wiser, more holistic decision-making to the AI. Maybe you spend it reading and researching, so the knowledge underlying your app is richer and more nuanced. Maybe you spend it hunting for obscure sources or offline archives, so that you can incorporate context that the LLM doesn’t already know. Maybe you spend your time talking with potential customers, so your choices more accurately reflect what they want.
All of these are valid choices, and they will all become important dimensions of competition and quality, even more so than they already are today. The true scarce resource continues to be the time and attention of other people, and I only expect the battle for that attention to keep heating up.
Software is the new frontier of book publishing
One of the domains I’m most excited about applying these new tools to is book publishing. Books have changed so little over time, and increasingly suffer in comparison to other, far more interactive and engaging forms of media.
I don’t think bemoaning this fact and lecturing people on the importance of reading is helpful, but I do believe interactive web apps like this could make a tremendous difference. What if, every time you finished a book, or even a single chapter, you were presented with a link to a free, interactive, personalized web app that directly applied the ideas you just read to your own situation?
Instead of trying to guess how to apply a book’s ideas, or get upsold to a course, or have to get expensive support from a coach or consultant, you would have a self-serve piece of software you can immediately engage with.
The value of a book is that the author has taken an extraordinary amount of time to research and think deeply about an important issue, topic, or skill. That’s a rare thing in our hype-driven online world of disposable headlines. But that same slow-moving, timeless quality makes it very difficult for books to recommend or prescribe any given form of implementation. There’s just too much variation between individuals to offer a one-size-fits-all solution, and long publishing timelines mean that any solution printed in the pages of a book is likely to be obsolete by the time it hits the shelves.
This is a way to combine the best of both worlds: to deliver the timeless, wise, holistic wisdom of books, accompanied by a suite of personalized, customizable, up-to-date digital implementation tools, accessible in one click or tap. This is how you save the culture of reading – not by resisting change but by embracing it. I plan on making extensive use of this approach in my next book.
We’re entering a more impressionistic era of creation
One of the most continuously surprising aspects of AI-assisted vibecoding is how brief, imprecise, informal, and vague my instructions can be, and still be understood. I could almost always just say “Fix this” with a screenshot, or “Make this look better,” or even just “Improve the question,” and AI would figure it out.
This is so different from past technologies that require you to be extremely exact, specifying what you want with mathematical precision. Even a single wrong character in a codebase of thousands of lines could result in a catastrophic error.
My unclear instructions often resulted in better results, because the AI would misinterpret my intentions and make improvements I hadn’t even thought of. Some of the best ideas came from the AI, either because I asked it for ideas or because it contributed them spontaneously as it guessed what I was trying to achieve.
Like the transition in painting style from the Realism of the mid-19th century to the Impressionism of the late 19th century, driven by painters’ desire to capture changing qualities of natural light, fleeting moments, and spontaneous experiences using quick, expressive brushwork rather than carefully finished compositions, we’re going to see a similar transition in software design.
Interestingly, what sparked the transition back then was technology – the advent of photography meant that scenes could be captured with nearly perfect realism, which devalued that ability by humans. Human artists pivoted in reaction, exploring a new frontier of perception, novel color combinations, and everyday life.
I think we’ll soon see our technological creations becoming much more impressionistic, based on ambiguous premonitions, subtle feelings, or vague notions that we can’t fully articulate. We’ll see people create various kinds of software as artistic expressions, or to capture a fleeting memory, or to convey a single message. Software will become its own mode of creative expression for a much wider range of people now that the price of entry has plummeted to near zero.
4 tips for using Cursor
Despite my lack of commitment to learning anything in particular, I found that I did end up learning a few things about how to work effectively in Cursor:
- You don’t have to deploy a new version with every new feature you build, as that takes a few minutes. But it’s a good idea to do so anytime you get a major new feature working, as you’ll be able to “roll back” to that point if you mess up anything in the future.
- It’s always helpful to bring in the relevant context to any interaction with the AI chat. Cursor makes this very easy by including an “add to chat” button both in the code window and in the terminal, which are the two places you’d want to draw on for context
- Pasting screenshots into the AI chat is remarkably helpful, as it allows the AI to see exactly what you’re referring to. Often, you don’t even need to say anything – the AI understands what’s working as soon as it sees how it’s appearing.
You can check out Cursor with a free trial at https://www.cursor.com. I signed up for the paid version for $20 per month to build my first app, though you’ll have access to a lot of functionality for free. I recommend their “getting started” documentation to learn about the basic features, which are more than enough to allow you to build your first simple app.
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