Volks

When Vibe Coding starts to resemble Directing more than Programming 1. Decision making is the lifeblood of a vibe coder. Your product lives or die based on your decisions. Vibe coding makes it easier than ever to build things quickly. With tools like Cursor and Claude Code, you can sketch out prototypes, build features, and even whole products in a fraction of the time it used to take. That speed is genuinely exciting. But it also changes where the difficulty sits. When execution gets cheaper, the limiting factor is no longer how fast you can write code. It becomes how well you decide what to build, what to keep, and what to leave out. In that sense, a vibe coder feels closer to a film director than a traditional programmer. A film director is not usually the person operating the camera, holding the lights or building the set. Their job is to decide how everything comes together so the film feels coherent. What matters most is not the individual shots, but the overall experience and vision. Vibe coding works the same way. AI can generate a lot for you. It can write systems, wire things up, and offer endless variations. What it cannot do is tell you which version actually serves the product vision you have. That responsibility still sits with you. If you follow this analogy through, it also explains something else. Just as there are great directors and mediocre ones, the same range exists in vibe coding. The tools are largely the same. The difference shows up in taste, restraint, and the ability to hold a clear vision across many small decisions. 2. Why this can feel uncomfortable for some programmers Looking at vibe coding this way also helps explain why some programmers struggle with it, even if they are technically very strong. Programming and directing are fundamentally different roles. Traditional programming rewards clarity, correctness, and well-defined problems. You are often given constraints, requirements, and success conditions. The work is about finding good solutions within those boundaries. Many programmers are excellent at this, and it is a valuable skill. Vibe coding shifts the emphasis. The problem space is less defined. The constraints are looser. Instead of being asked to solve a specific problem, you are often asked to decide which problem is worth solving in the first place. That can feel unsettling if you are used to clear specs and objective correctness. There is no compiler error for a feature that technically works but weakens the overall experience. There is no test that fails when a product feels bloated or unfocused. Directors deal with this ambiguity all the time. They make calls based on instinct, taste, and intent, knowing there is rarely a single correct answer. Vibe coding pulls programmers into a similar space, whether they like it or not. This does not mean programmers are bad at vibe coding. It just means the skill set required is different. The challenge is less about technical ability and more about being comfortable making subjective calls and living with their consequences. 3. Decisions per hour is the new bottleneck One thing I have noticed is that vibe coding increases the number of decisions you make in a short span of time. You are no longer blocked by implementation details, so you move straight from idea to choice. That can be energising, but it can also be draining in a different way. It is easy to keep adding things simply because you can. It is harder to pause and ask whether something is actually making the experience better. Directors run into this during editing. They might love a scene, but realise the film works better without it. Vibe coding creates similar moments. A system might be clever or fun to build, but still not belong in the final product. Over time, this becomes less about tools and more about taste. Taste is recognising when something technically works but does not help the overall experience. Taste is being willing to remove things that took effort to create. AI accelerates the process, but it does not remove the need for judgment. If anything, it makes that part more visible. When things go wrong, it is rarely because the tools were not capable enough. It is usually because the product lacked a clear vision. 4. Vibe coding is still very much a human exercise. The code may be generated, but the decisions are not. And in the end, those decisions are what people actually experience. If this analogy holds, then “vibe coder” may be a misleading label for a role that is increasingly about direction rather than coding, and perhaps the name deserves another look.