Vibe writing

| Jan Heuermann (jotaen.net)

Let’s talk about “vibe writing”

21st<br>Aug. 2026

13 min. read

When it comes to writing, I only used AI for smaller requests for a long time: fixing a typo, or smoothing over a clumsy sentence – the sort of thing a spellchecker does. I always found that handy, especially in English, which isn’t my mother tongue, but it never struck me as anything more than that.

On a whim, one day I pasted a rough draft of a technical document into the LLM – mostly bullet points and a few half-finished sentences – and asked it for feedback. I wasn’t expecting much, it was really just an attempt in a “nothing to lose” spirit. But what I found was that the reply was actually useful, and not just about the wording. The LLM had valuable things to say about the substance as well: whether my point landed, where the argument sagged, and what could help connect the dots. Huh. So I kept going. One reply led to the next, and somewhere along the line I looked up and realised I had a nearly finished piece of writing in front of me, built together with the AI from the blank page onward. I had never worked like that before – and it left me curious.

It was a few weeks later that the thought came back to me. I had spent the day vibe-coding at the office, and as I wrapped up my things to head home, my thoughts wandered back to using LLMs for writing. It had been rattling around in the back of my mind for a while as I continued to experiment with it, but mostly vaguely. And as I was cycling home, the whole topic suddenly condensed into a single term that occurred to me: vibe writing. I have no idea where it came from, but right there, the thing I’d been starting to explore had a name and a handle on it. So I started to pull.

For me, writing has always been a way of thinking. With an essay especially, I don’t usually set out to write about things that are already clear to me. Quite the contrary: the process of writing helps me shape my understanding, and I often find that a sentence simply refuses to come together until I’ve figured out what I actually mean. Which puts the entire idea of vibe writing in a slightly awkward light: because if writing is thinking, and I offload the writing to the machine, then what happens to the thinking?

Before we dive into that question, I must tell you how I decided to chase it – because that may change how you read all of this. I approached this as an experiment: to understand vibe writing, I’d explore it by its own means, and vibe-write my way through it. So I opened a chat with an AI and typed a single sentence to start – the one at the top of this piece, the title: Let’s talk about “vibe writing”. Then I let it run. Which means the piece you’re reading is that experiment, not a report written afterwards. That title is the only thing on this page I wrote myself directly. Everything under it came out of the conversation those few words set off – phrased by the machine, directed by me. We kept circling it at every range, now the shape of a whole section, now the choice of one word, then out again, reconsidering the structure, looping like that until I was completely satisfied. And yet I’ve left it in the machine’s own prose – something I normally wouldn’t – a decision I’ll come back to later on.

I know how that lands. Great, another AI-slop essay, close the tab. So before you do: this “quick” experiment has so far cost me north of 20 hours of dedicated working time, and if you printed the raw chat behind it, it would run to roughly 190 pages. Whatever this is, it isn’t the thing you’re bracing for. It was no faster than writing the piece by hand – if anything, even slower – and that lack of any speed-up, strange as it sounds, is where the whole thing gets interesting.

To see why slower might be the good news, let’s set speed aside. I often hear AI framed in terms of speed: it writes the email faster, drafts the doc faster, gets you to done faster. And that’s real – no argument there. But speed turns out not to be the thing I’m most excited about. What I keep coming back to is what the AI can do to the work itself: not turning out the same piece quicker, but turning out something I couldn’t have made alone.

Take the conversation this essay came from. Where else could I have had it? A back-and-forth like that, on demand, at the exact moment the thought was still warm, with a partner patient enough to go ten rounds with me at nine in the evening about a word that occurred to me on a bike. That kind of thinking used to be gated – behind finding the right person, in the right mood, with the right time. Now it isn’t. That’s not a faster version of something I already had. It’s something that had no price before, because it wasn’t for sale at any speed.

There’s a second thing I find almost hypnotic to watch, and it’s easiest to see in the chat window itself. That running conversation with the machine is doing two things at once. On one level it’s raw thinking,...