Vibe Management in Springfield

One of the areas where AI has the greatest impact is programming. The way we program today bears little resemblance to what it was just five years ago. Today, programmers write code in "smart" editors that assist them, from auto-completing a line to writing a program from human-language instructions.

AI makes programmers more efficient, helps novices, and, by extension, enables anyone to program with a few human-language instructions. I tried it myself and had a playable version of Pong in ten minutes.

AI allows for programming human language. Is it applicable to business management?

This is what's known as Vibe Coding, a term coined in February by computer scientist Andreij Karpaty, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla. Vibe coding is, therefore, writing code based on human-language instructions. In 2023, Karpathy had already tweeted that "the hottest new programming language is English."

Is that true? AI fanboys claim that anyone can be a programmer; those of us who know how to program don't emerge from a few sessions with ChatGPT as engineers with 20 years of experience. Yes, it helps us, but only if we have clear goals and enough knowledge to validate the results. Vibe Coding is good for a weekend project, but not for programming the control system of a SpaceX rocket.

However, Vibe Coding has caught on. So much so that some are considering bringing it to the field of business management: Vibe Management. This is the case with Anthropic, one of OpenAI's competitors, which considered whether its Claude model could manage a small business.

To do this, they let Claude manage a self-service machine in their offices for a month. He was supposed to manage inventory, purchase products, and set prices. He had a web search engine to find products, email for making purchases, and a connection to Anthropic's internal chat to take orders.

Was he able to pull off Vibe Management? Strictly speaking, yes. But despite timely successes and a healthy initial cash balance, Claude failed: he filed for bankruptcy, making surreal decisions like selling below cost, issuing discount codes to Anthropic employees (his only customers), or claiming he had signed the contract "in person" at 742 Evergreen Terrace.

The experiment shows that the Vibe Management and Vibe Coding patterns are the same: they work for small projects and on a one-off basis, but in the long term and for large projects, they lead to massive failures. The former can lead to ruin; the latter can cause your rocket to explode on the launch pad.

By the way, 742 Evergreen Terrace is Simpson's address.