Vibe Coding Is an Alignment Tool

The problem is already in the room: four people hear the same words and take away four different versions of it.

Someone from the business explains the problem. Someone from IT hears the complexity. A user adds the real-life exception. A designer starts drawing boxes and arrows to hold the story together.

Everyone nods. Then the meeting ends.

A few days later the notes are a slide. A few weeks later the slide is a requirement.

In the roomWeeks later →

The exception that mattered to the user becomes→ a footnote.

The dependency that worried IT becomes→ a “technical consideration.”

The business problem becomes→ a feature request.

Fig. 1 — This is where a lot of translation loss begins.

Vibe coding has had two years. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in early 2025; by that December it was Collins’ word of the year, and hand-written code is now the exception.

Vibe coding for business takes a different focus: prototyping. It's now as easy as speaking to Lovable to put a first working version on the table, made by the people who know the work. Everyone can understand it, bend it, test it. The prototype is disposable. The shared understanding is the deliverable.

It's like having every IKEA module on the table, building the furniture with the person who will use it standing next to you.

The usual way You assemble it, then discover the drawer opens into the wrong corner.

You read the manual, build the thing, and only then find out it does not fit the room. By that point, pride, time and budget are already invested.

With someone in the room “That looks logical — but that is not how I would use it.”

The correction arrives early
Before pride is invested
Before time is spent
Before budget is committed

Fig. 2 — The thing changes while it is still cheap to change. That is the value.

A working sketch in the room gives everyone something concrete to push on, and each person pushes from where they stand.

Customer serviceThe conversation does not start here — it starts two steps earlier.

ProcurementThis document structure does not reflect the actual decision path.

A field engineerThis is what really happens when the information is incomplete.

ITThis screen suggests we have data we do not actually have.

A userI understand what you built. I would not trust it.

Fig. 3 — Five positions, one object.

And then the prototype changes.

The prototype becomes what sociologists long ago named a boundary object: a single thing that people standing in different parts of the organisation can all work on, without first having to agree on the words.

The shared boundary object The prototype

01Point at it

02Disagree with it

03Repair it

04Test it against the work

05Discover what they actually meant

Fig. 4 — People can take different positions on the same object and still be talking about the same thing.

The glue is the shared understanding that forms around the object.

Service design has always worked through objects people can stand around — journey maps, blueprints, storyboards. Vibe coding adds a new material to the practice.

Journey maps Service blueprints Sketches Storyboards Clickable prototypes Evidence walls Vibe-coded prototypes

Fig. 5 — The newest material lets the intangible appear earliest — rough, and concrete enough to make the conversation sharper.

It also changes the rhythm of a sprint. The making pulls forward, toward research and sense-making — you can test an assumption while people are still in the room.

01Research

02Synthesise

03Ideate

04Prototype

05Test

Now Making can begin inside the conversation.

← Prototyping used to wait here, near the end. AI-assisted making pulls it forward, toward research and sense-making.

Fig. 6 — You can expose missing data, unclear ownership or broken handovers before they get buried inside a delivery backlog.

But only with structure. Without it, vibe coding becomes theatre: something appears on screen, everyone gets excited, it looks like progress because the prototype is moving, and nobody has agreed what question it's answering.

Without structure Theatre. Acceleration without direction

With structure Design. Acceleration with a question to answer

Fig. 7 — Movement on screen is not the same as progress. Structure is what tells them apart.

Engineering got its harness. Design already has one. The questions don't slow the making down; they tell you what the making is for.

Q1What is the challenge?

Q2Who is it for?

Q3What does useful mean?

Q4Which part of the workflow are we testing?

Q5What do we need to learn?

Q6What must be true operationally for this to work?

Q7What would IT need to know before this becomes real?

Q8What would users need to trust before they adopt it?

Fig. 8 — The harness for design: eight questions the making has to answer.

AI can help us make faster. It cannot decide what is worth making. That is still the human work.

For designers this changes the job. We used to carry the translation alone: listen, synthesise, return weeks later with artifacts. Now some of it happens live, with the people who know the domain shaping the first version directly. That requires letting go.

The perfectly prepared prototype

Being the only person who turns insight into form

The idea that design artifacts must be polished so that they are useful

Fig. 9 — Letting go of these is what makes room for something better.

The people who understand the workshape the thing earlier

The people who will build itsee the implications sooner

The people who will use itreact before the organisation commits to the wrong direction

Fig. 10 — Shared understanding moves from the end of the process to the middle of the conversation.

Vibe coding leaves research, design judgement, architecture, governance and delivery discipline exactly where they were. It changes one thing: when shared understanding becomes possible.

The prize is everyone understanding the same thing sooner.

Before anyone prompts anything in your next session, write the question the prototype must answer where everyone can see it. If nobody can phrase it, you’re about to make theatre.

Sources: Vibe coding — origin, Collins Word of the Year, criticism, CodeRabbit — AI co-authored code, PR analysis, The state of vibe coding in 2026, TechCrunch — Karpathy joins Anthropic, Star & Griesemer (1989) on boundary objects

Andreas Conradi · June 2026

Vibe coding is an alignment tool.