Managers Have Been Vibe Coding All Along

Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. Launched two projects. Okutaç and Caccepted. It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You start simple. You come up with features. You poke at the product until it makes sense. You skip the logs, skip the diagrams, and rely on repetition and intuition until things start behaving the way they should. That’s my understanding of vibe coding.

And managers have been doing it forever.

Back when I was overseeing a trading platform migration, I spent days testing the exact scenarios our customers had failed. We were rolling out the new infrastructure gradually, and I wanted to catch issues before they multiplied. Each morning, I’d go through the logs, find the failed transactions, and pull them directly from the system. Then I’d replay them one by one. I’d placed small buy and sell orders, watching how the system handled them, and comparing the outcomes with what we expected to happen.

I was tracing behavior. Taking a look at what broke, when it broke, and under what conditions. Some failures were easy to reproduce, others only appeared