Good guys don’t get the girl. At best they’re friendzoned into oblivion. They listen. They validate the girl’s feelings. They ask what she needs and then they wait to be chosen.
Bad guys get the juice. And the apples. And the juicer. They get everything because they don’t treat this like an emotional whirlwind. They treat it like a battle that has to be won, like a field of limited options that you have to narrow until the only remaining one is victory.
It’s really the same car, but 2 driving styles. The car is AI, and the way you drive it shapes what you get out of it.
AI is not smart. It doesn’t “reason”. It’s just an incredibly complex statistical approximation engine. It does not know your idea, your use case, your expectations. It just follows what you prompt it into, and it starts narrowing the path to get close to what you described.
A huge GIGO playground: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you give it vibes, you get back vibes, if you give it the results you expect, you get results.
The good guys get back vibes.
The bad guys get work done.
Bad Guys Are Building
The vibe coding team starts by describing an idea. Soon, they overwrite it with a feeling: “make it look nice, I want a beautiful app”. Guess what: the model describes the feeling back. Suddenly, you feel accepted, understood and all that nonsense. For a few hours you are in love with an engine that literally cannot know who you are.
Then 6 hours later you stop talking to the agent. Your chat vanishes, the feelings inside it too, and the only trace of your app idea is in the code. And the code is awful. First, you have no idea what’s inside. Second, you have no idea why something is inside.
Bad guys are a different breed. They have witnessed at least one database crash in production. They know why and how it happened, they know what to do to avoid it next time.
They also know why people who successfully shipped on a Friday and unicorns belong to the same category: both are mythical creatures. They don’t exist in the real world.
Bad guys never tell the agent how it should “feel”. They tell exactly what the agent has to do, period.
- what must happen. -what must never happen.
- which section owns the truth.
- what stays local and what’s in production.
- how we know we’re done and how we accept the work of the agent.
Bad guys write their own harnesses. They’re token-aware and they know how to squeeze every bit of power from what they have. They don’t spend thousands on API tokens. Most of them keep their spending under $100/month.
Bad guys know the approximation engine has limits and they enforce them. They use context sparsely and keep only what’s needed there.
Good Guys Are Getting High
Good guys splurge on long conversations and detours of why that tiny feature reminds them of their childhood madeleines.
Good guys will choose the latest, flashiest tool and then brag about using it ten times on Twitter, before even firing it. Then, after they fire it, they post again, this time with screenshots and detailed descriptions of intense vibe coding sessions.
Vibes feel good. You talk to a machine that seems to understand you, to follow your orders, to bring to life that vague idea that was floating in your mind for years. It’s like you’re getting high on your own dopamine.
But the higher you get, the harder you crash.
After the first MVP, you get into a maze that’s impossible to navigate. You change one thing, four other things break. You ask the model to fix the bugs, it introduces a fifth source of truth and 3 more helpers you never asked for. You suddenly have 500KB of markdown files in the app folder.
You cannot blame AI for this. You just gave to an approximation machine your approximate thoughts and it just destroyed your approximate expectations.
To get out of this deadlock, good guys will keep prompting until the machine “straightens up”. Descending into a downward spiral of frustration.
Bad guys start by writing the test case, so they never get high. They never have 500KB of markdown files in the app folder. If anything, sometimes they get bored, because winning is so predictable for them.
Good guys vibe code. And they live in the friendzone forever.
Bad guys write specs. And they ship useful stuff.
You never get predictable outcomes by sharing with a statistical machine how you feel about it.
You get them by describing exactly what needs to happen before you start crunching tokens.
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