The first thing vibe coding builds is confidence it will help you succeed

Summary

Secret CEO In 1991, when I was 16, a Norwegian Exchange student gave an inspirational performance of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in the original Norwegian, at my high school talent night. She delivered this performance with such gusto that every word of her performance stuck in my mind and, to this day, I can recite the Three Billy Goats Gruff in Norwegian. I can "Vibe Code" Norwegian. I don't speak the Language, but this hasn't stopped me from confidently using this skill with any Norwegian person I have met. My parlour trick immediately falls apart as soon as they respond to me in anything other than English, but over the years I have used it as an icebreaker with the reserved people of Norway as they find my heavily Australian accented rendition of their culturally significant fairy tale cute. This is the same reaction I got when I showed off my freshly built package to our Chief Technology Officer, proudly stating that I had decided to run the functional specification and user story of that new filer project that we were working on through an AI coding agent. The idea was to see if it would be useful to the project. He asked me a series of pointed questions that immediately reminded me of the feeling I got when the poor Norwegian person I had just regaled with my talent responded with "Snakker du litt norsk?" (Do you speak a little Norwegian?) after which I was immediately stumped and a bit embarrassed. Through their use of "litt" in the sentence, they were informing me they knew I understood very little of what I was saying, but they appreciated the effort. Back to my conversation with the CTO, who looked at my vibe-coded project and asked "Why is linting disabled here?" I wasn't sure so I responded: "What does linting mean?" The CTO told me to hand over my laptop and go and face the wall in the hardcoded credential corner. "But I need it; I'm helping," I protested. "You will get it back when you realize what you have done and say sorry," the CTO responded. Th...