We were already living in a vibe-based civilisation long before "vibe coding" came along

Everyone’s worried about the rise of “vibe coding” — the idea that we’re starting to let LLMs generate content, code, or legal arguments that we don’t fully understand.

But that’s not new. We were already doing that before AI showed up.

This meme sums it up perfectly: engineers who can’t code, lawyers who can’t read legal docs, politicians who don’t know their own laws, and yet somehow the whole thing still runs.

Modern life is too complex for anyone to hold in their head.

Most software is built on codebases so layered and outsourced that even senior engineers only understand the top few layers.

Politicians regularly legislate on issues they have no direct expertise in, relying on advisors, briefings, and party lines.

Even something as essential as healthcare is delivered through institutions shaped by protocols and policy frameworks most of us couldn’t begin to explain.

We navigate those systems not by understanding everything, but by reading the signals, asking the right questions, and trusting the right sources.

Rick Rubin, one of the most successful music producers alive, even openly admits: “I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music.” He doesn’t know how to operate a soundboard. Does that make him less credible? Or more?

This is how high-trust systems work. We rely on tools, people and institutions to fill in the gaps for us. The key skill isn’t mastery. It’s navigation.

That’s why I think the anxiety around LLMs is often misplaced. They’re not eroding some golden age of human understanding. They’re compressing access to knowledge. They’re giving people a way into systems that would otherwise take years of training to approach. And in doing so, they’re levelling the playing field.

If that sounds like cheating, so is using a calculator. So is Googling an error message. So is asking someone smarter than you to show you how it works.

No system is perfect. But if it helps more people make smarter decisions, that’s a win.

The future isn’t going to be clean, linear or fully explained. But if you can read the room, work with the tools, and stay curious you’ll do just fine.

Even if you’re just going on vibes.