Written Date: 5/17/2025
Why You Need This Process
For the last 2 years I've been using AI to drive most of my development efforts. It wasn't called "vibe coding" then, but it was just as frowned upon. The phrase "AI slop" was coined and tossed around willy nilly. Under every rock and around every corner you would find an expert ready to jump out and say that AI was overhyped. It was tenuous time to be using AI for helping you code.
I will admit that the concerns brought forward were true then and are still mostly true now. However, there were these moments of brilliance that would shine through. These felt like samples of what was to come in the future, something that we would eventually consider to be just plain normal.
I've held on to the inspiration and hope that came from those moments of clarity and brilliance. My wish was to find a way to make them happen consistently. That's a thing you'll come to discover about AI, consistency is the hard part. It's easy to make something incredible happen once. Can you make make it happen two times? Five times? What about nine out of ten times? Can you make AI work consistently 100% of the time?
The five layer design approach is the wisdom I've been able to bring together from thousands of hours of trial and error from the past several years. It is in no way complete. Consider this the first assembly line for the Model T. There will be many improvements and refinements to this process as time goes on. I expect there will be competing schools of theory emerging at some point. We'll see whose idea wins 😉.
So What's The Point?
This question is easy. The point is to create a process the produces a more consistent performance from AI models. If we were talking about people, we would refer to this as "gaining experience and building expertise". However, AI models don't learn the same way people do. They only imitate human behavior. Because of this, we need a process that consistently represents the kind of process that we as humans naturally develop during our experiences.
This is how I came to define the 5 layers. It defines a process that can be performed over and over, with adjustments and customizations, to yield a consistently successful outcome using AI models as the main work horse.
Slaughtering Sacred Cows
From here on out I'll only be discussing the concept of the five layers and how to vibe code your way through them from a high-level perspective. That's because the code does not matter.
Code as art is no longer important. It never really was, but most engineers who come from a pre-AI era have gone through a period of time where their code was their art. The vibe coding era is the beginning of the death of boutique code as art.
I will slaughter many sacred cows as I wrote about this. It's important to do. It's a resetting of the first principles that is required in order for software development to move forward as an industry.
I look forward to seeing what you build. Vibe on my friend.
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