From Vibe to Demo
In a recent post, I exhorted others to stop vibing all day long.
It appears that the term "vibe" has been a bit contentious. Many people I've interacted with assumed it meant that we'd be pushing code to production that no human ever inspected. As a team, however, we embraced the idea of vibing for prototyping but not for production code.
Upon reflection, I think it's probably better to describe code you never inspected as just a "demo". I will likely use the phrase, "let me vibe up a demo for you."
Building a demo is an incredible way to build proof of concepts and to get buy-in from stakeholders. We can iterate quickly through a demo to show what's possible for stakeholder sign-off.
During the demo development, I usually keep tabs on what the agent is doing to ensure it builds a solid foundation. I don't want it go off the rails into slop - I do want a functional demo!
From Demo to Product
Demos are great! But, we can't stop there. Stopping at building demos is like a promise with no follow through. We have to take the demo and go through the AI-native development flow to ensure the code is built correctly and securely.
I really like how the term "demo" conveys the notion of an idea of a product and not the product itself. It is tentative code that has not been vetted by professional engineers.