Work is work, not a ‘vibe' – no matter what Microsoft says

“You’ve probably heard of vibe coding” the cool kids at The Verge wrote at the start of their piece on Microsoft’s new generative AI feature for Office apps. I had heard the term. Or I had read it somewhere with no further exploration of its meaning. But, at the time, I couldn’t really say I knew what that was.

I still can’t, and I’m a technology journalist. I’m meant to have my finger on the industry's pulse, or at least my nose in its business… and yet I had no idea what vibe coding was. I consoled myself that it was something for the younger generation, hipsters who code, nothing for us B2B hacks.

Then Microsoft came along, keen to follow the zeitgeist, and added the term to its suite of Office apps. So now I’ll likely have to use the term ‘vibe’ in a professional way, as opposed to just commenting on places and people I don’t like.

Naturally, this is the fault of generative AI, which currently feels like many different ill vibes all at once. To explain, Microsoft is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. There’s another one, an Office Agent in Copilot Chat, that can create PowerPoint presentations with a chatbot. These work, according to Microsoft, “in the same way as vibe coding”.

Vibe coding is essentially a chatbot-based approach to software development, where the developer can describe a task to a large language model (LLM) to generate code, rather than writing or even having to review it normally. If it sounds like something made to make generative AI sound sexy and ultimately more appealing, then you’ll not be surprised to learn that it was coined by one of OpenAI’s co-founders, Andrej Karpathy. He clearly doesn’t think you’re using generative AI to do work; he thinks you're vibing it, man.

So the people who peddle the technology that enables us to generate terrible works of ‘art’ and shoddily-written copy have come up with a vacant term for automation. Even though we already have another term for the type of thing that vibe coding produces: AI slop.

A ‘vibe’ is a feeling. Or rather, our interpretation of the feeling we get from someone or something. It doesn’t make sense in the context of coding – either actually coding or automating it – as that suggests we are giving off the vibe of coding and not actually doing it at all. Place it in front of ‘work’, and it seems even more concerning. I don’t think it would go down very well if I were to tell my boss I spent the morning ‘vibing’ in a Word document.

I know this makes me sound like some old man complaining about the youth of today and their fancy new tools. But I don’t like the way they’re being sold to us. Automation is not a vibe and generative AI is not all that cool. It shouldn’t be, either. It should be like cloud computing; unexciting background stuff that quietly makes everything easier. But if you start making it sound trendy or cool, then you end up with a passing fade, like skinny jeans or the metaverse, and I didn’t look good in either of those.

Worse, if you unintentionally dismiss what we do for a living as mere vibes, then it comes across as something you don’t care about – like our work is not important to you. And I can’t stress this enough, Microsoft: we are not ‘vibing’, we are working.