Vibe the Grind, Craft the Joy

Earlier this year, I co-founded Resilens, and we have been quite busy the last months. It's a joy to work with old and new friends and we are convinced we are building something meaningful. And while we are bootstrapping ourselves into existence, speed is of the essence: the time and bandwidth of a few team members is the scarcest resource we have.

That scarcity has made me think harder about how I create things: when to do the work myself, when to hand it off, and when to let AI take a first pass. This post picks up a thread from an earlier one about human creativity and AI.

The Grind and the Joy 🔗

For the sake of this post, assume two modes when creating something new.

Sometimes you really are not interested in the result, you just need to get it done. It might be a legal document you need to draft, or a letter to your local administration. You are not attached to the process or the result; you just want it done. Let's call this mode grind².

But if you really care about something, you are not only interested in the result of the process — you are genuinely interested in being part of the process. Let's call this mode joy³.

What's grind and what's joy is obviously very subjective. My daughters cannot understand why I am so fascinated by any kind of tech-nerdery. On the other hand, I am not a person who sees his destiny in accounting, although I know people who do enjoy keeping financial numbers in order.

And of course, life can't be all joy — as we say in German, Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof ("life is no pony farm"). Every day you face tasks somewhere between the two modes; it's rarely black and white. You could even trick yourself through grind work by making it more fun, like listening to an audiobook while doing the dishes.

Three Ways to Start in the Age of AI 🔗

Until recently, starting a task meant one of two things: do it yourself, or ask another person. AI¹ adds a third option — fast, cheap, always available — and the temptation is to reach for it everywhere, grind and joy alike.

I want to recommend Christoph Niemann's visual essay about the creative process⁴. This quote stayed with me:

Creating art is a nonlinear process. I start with a rough goal. But then I head into dead ends and get lost or stuck. The secret to my process is to be on high alert in this deep jungle for unexpected twists and turns, because this is where a new idea is born. I can’t make art when I’m excluded from the most crucial moments.

Niemann's worry is being excluded from the crucial moments. That is exactly the choice AI now puts in front of me. Faced with such a task, I notice three starting points:

1. Vibing: I delegate to AI first and only minimally interact until I say, "eh, good enough". I deliberately exclude myself from the creative process.
2. Crafting: I start working myself and may use AI only for critique, options, or improvements, because I care about the creative process and want to own it.
3. Commissioning: I ask another human to create something, because I want their taste, skill, judgment, or care in the work.

Vibing and crafting are about how I relate to my own work. Commissioning is different in kind — it hands the work to someone else — so I treat it separately, after the matrix below.

When to Vibe, When to Craft 🔗

To decide when to vibe and when to craft, I came up with the following matrix.

The most dangerous case is vibing the work you actually care about. It feels efficient and if you are under time pressure, you are really tempted to do so. But if the work is your joy work, the process is the point: skip it and you have not saved time, you have thrown away the part you wanted. The detours and dead ends are also where judgment grows, so vibe them away often enough and you erode the very taste you would need to tell a good result from a hollow one. The erosion of judgment becomes especially dangerous in my own field: write code this way and you pile on what is now called cognitive debt, which has affected real world systems already.

This does not mean avoiding AI on work you care about: vibing and crafting are a spectrum, not a switch. You can still own a process and work with an AI agent participate; the trap is not using AI, but delegating until no crucial moment is left for you.

The second most dangerous case is vibing the grind without verifying the result. As a friend reminded me: if you specify the work vaguely, you should not be surprised when the output is vague or simply wrong (garbage in, garbage out). The machine can help you move faster, but you still need enough understanding to check the result; otherwise you only automate the route to embarrassing yourself.

A Third Way: Commissioning 🔗

Commissioning does not fit into this matrix, and that's the point. Grind and joy are subjective and describe my own relationship to my work. The moment I "commission" someone, the question is no longer mine to answer: I am trusting or hoping that what feels like grind to me is craft to them. That is also why commissioning is not the same as delegating to AI. As I argued in Yes, Yes And, human-to-human interaction has a magic of its own — you are not only buying output, you are inviting another person's taste, care, and judgment into the result.

Conclusion 🔗

These are my thoughts on grind and joy in the age of AI. All of the above may seem obvious. Good for you! It continues to be something I think about daily — especially in a phase where speed matters and attention is scarce. So my motto nowadays is:

Vibe the grind, verify the result.
Craft the joy, stay in the process.

What do you think? Don't hesitate to share your feedback with me.