Vibeworking is using generative AI to produce complex and refined creative and analytical outputs.
Its most prolific use is vibecoding. You set the vibe as the overall vision for a product instead of coding its elements one by one.
In law, vibeworking is most visible in generation of entire legal texts. It is tricky because of the legal data behind paywalls or in clunky databases, rapidly changing regulations, and the innate difficulties in checking legal outputs that apply to Generative AI tools and associates alike.
So what exactly is vibeworking, how does it fit into the legal practice, and why should we all obsess about developing taste?
What is vibeworking
Vibecoding is the current era of generating code using AI. This practice means that you are producing more or less complete apps using generative AI (via Cursor, Claude, or tools like v0, Lovable, or bolt) to achieve your desired vibe.
In his newsletter, Ethan Mollick expands this into a generalised term vibeworking. Vibeworking means creating and refining any complex piece of work using generative AI. This can be vibecoding a game or vibe analyzing complex crowdfunding data.
Vibeworking is both a huge opportunity and a huge problem for lawyers. Legal context is tricky as primary legal sources are locked behind paywalls and in clunky databases. Checking the outputs is both essential and cumbersome. Spotting issues is hard – and the longer the legal document is, the harder it gets.
That does not, however, hinder lawyers from vibing left and right, generating contracts, court submissions, and general legal advice as the ultimate acts of legal creation.
Does this contract vibe with you?
Anecdotally, the experience that many lawyers have had with LLMs seems to be that they opened it once (preferably GPT 3.5), asked it some extremely obscure question that can only be answered by a piece of case law from 1976, and concluded that the whole thing is useless, never to return again.
What these lawyers had in common was the expertise to sense when something was off. Well, at least some did spot those hallucinated precedents.
Legal expertise is essential in producing high quality legal outputs. Without the skills to validate the generated text, there is a risk of accepting looks-ok-to-me outputs that are not fully legally correct.
The rise of the AI DJ
The ultimate added benefit of vibeworking is in the combination of generated draft, iteration, and output validation using domain expertise.
And if that does not work, thrash the draft and start over – no need to be precious with something that took you four prompts to make.
This changes the dynamics of work. I increasingly catch myself joyfully referring to my job description as AI DJ. Or as Ethan Mollick puts it: “Sometimes I found myself acting as a creative director, other times as a troubleshooter, and yet other times as a domain expert validating result.”
This process of refinement is increasingly referred to as taste.
In law, taste (or good lawyering) represents a very substantial and knowledge-intensive set of benchmarks. Taste is critical in shaping a good argument, strategic use of ambiguity, and ultimately, spotting gaps in legal analysis. A proper legal product must be legally correct but also understandable. “[R]eading her prose has been as enjoyable as watching her in action” writes a NYT columnist about Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and her readable judicial opinions.
But how to acquire the taste necessary to provide a truly refined legal output?
Good vibes are made by good taste
The generally accepted way to acquire taste is through deliberate practice, a term coined by Anders Ericsson.
Lawyers often refer to deliberate practice as associates spending years in a basement reviewing documents.
Is repetitive document review really essential or is there a better way?
Different thinkers shaped their taste in various ways. Cal Newport worked on it as a writer by carefully watching and reviewing movies. Elizabeth Goodspeed got inspired in design history. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sharpened her writing thanks to Vladimir Nabokov who taught her European Literature.
Does the rise of AI preface the golden age of careful reading of selected eloquent case law? Could AI help in this pursuit?
Either way, tastemaking should make it into the future of legal education. As Ethan Mollick concludes his exploration of vibeworking: “It was my complex expertise (or lack thereof) that determined the quality of the output.”
Final provisions
Vibeworking is a big opportunity in law. Quickly prototyping legal outputs and refining them sounds like an interesting (albeit demanding) job description.
Taste, combined with access to well-trained legal tools, will be essential in shaping the law and ensuring that generative AI is used productively for vibeworking contracts and legal texts.
All this development is, as is generally the case with Generative AI, incredibly rapid. Who knows how long we will stay in the vibeworking era.
As of right now, I am excited because rapid prototyping and pushing the limits of legal information has again become a lot more approachable.
And that is, indeed, my kind of vibe.
Baru
